My Songs Know What You Do When Darkness Falls
by Sarah Rose Serena
Summary: With her back to him, she says, "Much has changed since France." She means to ward him off, but his voice is steady, full of intent when he returns, "You are still my Mary." And she whips around. "I was never yours!" He grabs her then, fist clenched in the curls at her nape, bringing her up close. Her teeth grit from its roughness. Fiercely, he declares, "You were. Always. Mine."
1. Love Makes Us Long

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_**My Songs Know What You Do When Darkness Falls**_

a_ Reign _story_  
Sarah Rose Serena_

* * *

**Love Makes Us Long**

_"Every story begins by song, Whether sweeping epic or slow sojourn, For music sates our soul, Where love makes us long."_

: : :

The great bards are our greatest treasure, her mother had told her. They tell our stories with soul and striving. They make us beautiful and romantic. They make us epic. All the lovely things we cannot afford if we are to survive. And the girl understood. Her name was Queen for as long as she ever remembers. The fate of a nation has rested on her choices, on her aspirations, a heavy burden put upon her slender shoulders at nine months onward. Her people rely on how she measures up. In the end, she fears, her greatest deepest fear of all, she will fall short somehow. She just knows so, with her broken heart and her hollow soul, has always known this. And that knowing terrifies her more than anything in the world on the inside, even as she smiles brightly and pretends to be lovely, her duty to demure yet hold fast, to charm yet control, to do all the things the survival of her beleaguered people are depending on her to do that she has no earthly idea how to achieve. Not truly. So she pretends. Her whole life has been pretending so far. Although she is only fifteen, she doubts that mainstay is due to change. And so she seeks solace in those inspiring dramatics of wonderful stories, of poetic bard tales, because these tellings are the only earnest experiences she fears she will ever be free to indulge.

The closest she comes for herself are sparse fleeting moments she shares with her betrothed. With lovely Francis.

Mother was right to teach her to keep herself withdrawn. She hadn't really understood until she returned to France, to the dangerous deceitful entanglements of royal court as a grown girl, finding herself with enemies around every corner, scheming her demise or her ruin, finding herself with not a single soul that she may wholly trust. Whether she wishes she may or not, and there are those whom she does, whom she desperately wishes to place her faith in. However she begins to delude herself, a part of her always knows she may only rely on herself above all, no one beyond. Because she is Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, and that which is the most powerful position is what leaves her most of all vulnerable. An irony of which is not lost on the girl.

: : :

The path through the forest is a treacherous one, far more so than crossing from the river Loire over the stone bridge of Orléans. But many things could be said of Adelaide Kinsley, and that most prevalent of which is her daring spirits, her fondness for risk some might call reckless. Herself, she merely thinks it living an interesting life. Her utmost aspiration of all.

And as goes with taking risks, oft there are difficulties to defer. Miles outside her destination, she hears the anxious whinny of the horses, hears the warning shout by her driver from outside her closed carriage, hurried hoof beats of her escorts surrounding the structure in shield as their party is set upon by unruly natives. Travellers no doubt, an archaic kind that haunt the woodlands here, sacrificing interlopers to the unholy spirits they worship, believing it to be a practice which grants them favor and protection. _How wrong ones can be_, she thinks with a wistful sigh, dancing nimble fingertips across her pouted mouth as she listens.

Her lead escort is pulled to the ground from horseback and his throat slit. The next protector falls quick to follow. Though this is to be expected, crossing their territory as such, causing savage Travellers to descend, she is still mightily offended by the delay. And so, with the death gurgles of a hired driver in her ears, Adelaide climbs from the coach to face her foes. Fiery red gold hair falls from her sweep as she steps down, rustling gently in the wind, one hand spent corralling her skirts from hindrance, her other sliding between the secret slit of them on the other side, sinking into a knotted fabric fastened to her lower thigh. There is no one in sight when she brashly emerges, only a spread of bodies around the hitch, her newly acquainted companions slaughtered without care, shadows flitting about the fringes of the trees the only thing to see.

The others were extraneous. It is the woman they want. Their goal is capture. She knows this. However, she has zero intention of serving sacrifice to the bleeding.

"Come out from where you hide," she calls, not bothering to raise her husky voice but a notch. "Show yourselves."

The leader of this little hunting party is the first to step free of the shadows they manipulate. He is tall and towering in stature, a broad dusky Eastern European far from his homeland, like her. His eyes are cold, uncomprehending of her words though she spoke them with French, leaving off her native tongue. As she looks upon him, she feels a fleet of at least seven fellow of him fan out from the treeline a dozen or so yards behind her. The odds are particularly ungentlemanly, indeed, but she has met with worse.

"Not a very pretty bunch, are you?" she taunts absently, glancing around in measure, using her admittedly rusty skills in broad Slavic.

"_Hellene_," he hisses at her in old Latin, one of the kinder slurs she has heard in her time, but it still makes her laugh.

"Yes. You've chosen your prey unwisely, dear."

They are certainly not Pavees or Ceàrdannan. But their Romani origins are also debatable.

The men edging closer from behind creep another surge before the big guy cuts them a look. Turning focus back to her, he clips, "Come to us, witch. We will sanctify your soul before we feed you to _valde __crudus_."

The great bleeding. Just as she thought. That doesn't sound pleasant. And she is nobody's food. So she takes a step toward him. Smiles prettily. Sweeps a gleaming dagger from inside her skirts in a lightning motion. Throws it fiercely around her shoulder so that its sharp steel blade imbeds into the throat of the closest Traveller at her back. Looking to their leader, Adelaide cants her head as that pretty smile turns savage.

There is a slain escort at her feet as she bends with a snap, stealing his holstered broadsword, coming up swinging the steel in a sweeping arc as the Travellers charge, echoes of barbaric cries resounding through the trees. She makes short work of the assault. Takes the remaining wildlings on easily enough with her martial skills. Honestly, if she had known her day would be this exciting, she would have worn less lavish attire. As it is, her skirts get ripped, smudged with soil and loam, and her brocaded bodice is splattered by streaks of spurting crimson.

All in all, not a terribly bad afternoon.

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My Songs:  
Kinsley Arrival: _Scotland_ by The Lumineers

_AN: I don't know. Should I continue?_


	2. Of Red Hair & Wild Eyes

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**Of Red Hair & Wild Eyes **

_"If the devil should take mistress, She be fire and ice of red hair and wild eyes, A temperament like storms on the sea."_

: : :

There is a recurring dream that haunts her sleep. That disturbs her days until she puts it from her mind completely. But each time it arrives, it grows more difficult to do so once the sun rises. More difficult to ignore the omen it presents. In her dream, she is all alone within the great castle, a dark deserted prison sprawling outward in grand stone and extravagant structure. The cold that has overtaken seeps straight into her bones, a deep biting freeze no fire of our world can combat, pervading her very being. Her white gown falls flowingly to the icy ground beneath her feet as she moves across the shadowed room, grit of stone blanketed by the plush crush of pure fallen snow, drawn toward a prism window of her gilded cage, where watery shards of blue moonlight filter in. Long black tresses drape her shoulders and farther, marring the whiteness of her dress, cut stark of her paleness, of the muted mien from her surroundings. At the glass, it is too dark to see outward, to blurred to distinguish details, but when she presses a delicate hand flat to the cool surface of it, she feels the touch of warm sticky substance. And when she pulls away, wrist turning towards her, her eyes find the pale softness of her skin soaked in rich innocent blood. Fresh red staining her for ever more. Then once she wakes, although the red is gone, she almost could say she feels it linger beneath the flesh. If that were not madness.

"Mary. There you are." The sultry voice of her lady-in-waiting pulls her from her reverie, as her closest companion reaches her side, and she pauses where she stands, angling to face the blonde in the center of the wide stone corridor. "I was just coming to find you."

Hands primly clasped before a burgundy midday gown, her queen is preoccupied by reserved introversion at the moment. "Walk with me, Kenna."

Turning to continue on, each young girl paces languidly, side by side, winding arms together. Kenna eyes her furtively askance, sensing her queen's troubled mood, knowing her place too well to question her concerns. About certain things, of course, but today is for conflicts of importance. Her uncle departed not a quarter hour prior, journeying to address the Parlement of Paris, and she has been diverted by thoughts of the grave news he brought with him of home ever since he bid his queen farewell. Worries of the Protestant rebellion gaining traction on the horizon.

The smart trot of nails on stone patter behind the girls as they veer to the eastern for an open castle veranda overlooking the royal riverside gardens, her beloved Stirling keeping in their wake. Thoughts a heavy burden on her drawn countenance, she takes the animal out for exercise amidst calla lilies and wild iris flowers, a cloudy overcast day without sun but for watery grayed daylight, yards bustling with the activity of servants readying the grounds for the solstice Masquerade gala king and queen shall host this very evening. Looking on from above to the stable boy playing fetch with her Stirling, she rests cool hands on the thick balustrade of veranda, rebel Kenna at her side, until her eyes turn toward the north. A shock of cropped gold curls catches her attention and pulls it avidly in. At the fountain fronds, her dear Francis is sparring playfully with his fencing instructor. She observes his light and his cheer of boyish security, and is momentarily diverted from her path of a darkening mood, as if he proved to be her sun, diluting the strength of her gathering storm if not entirely chasing the volatile weather away.

If only everything in this life could be as simple as requited love.

If only all love could be as blissful as that which stems from childhood affection.

Mary allows herself a soft sigh, wistful in nature, her focus fracturing at the sound of approach, forgetting her schoolgirl contemplations as her gaze swings to the west again, where Stirling had been happily frolicking by the pond not moments ago with the peasant boy charged his keeper. There in the distance beyond the pleasant pair is Sebastian, emerging from the forbidden treeline at an easy gallop on horseback with his men riding around him, fresh from the forest, his dark hair windswept and his face flushed, looking every bit the wild highlander she suspected lurked inside of him from the very start of their acquaintance. Something of his spirit reminisces of homeland. Something in his eyes. Free and unrestricted intensity. A force of icy cool fire.

"Ah, look." Kenna follows her line of sight with a sudden look of sly superiority about her now. "Here comes the bastard brother, fresh from the hunt."

Fingers furling at the tips to bite into sanded stone beneath her grasp, Mary speaks tensely to her companion, her features impassive but for the slight tightening of her jaw. Picturesque in her essence of a coolly disapproving queen. "Refrain yourself from calling him that, Kenna."

"I meant no offense, Mary. Truth be told, I find him quite enticing," she confides, as if sharing a wicked secret with her ruler.

Unswayed from her stiff reserve, Mary hedges, "He is a good man."

"He is a rogue," Kenna archly corrects, not entirely disagreeing, merely amending, which her queen cannot quite dismiss. Leaning conspiratorially into her slender shoulder, she chimes a last, "Too charming for his own care."

The man in question looks up their way that very instance, finding her standing there above, easily, naturally, as if connected by the preordained path of orbits. Those eerie silvery blue eyes flashing wondrously, as they do whenever he turns them on her, Sebastian smiles, wide and bright in a brief flare of unconscious expression, and she can't resist the soft tug of her lips at the sight. Strange things coil to life in her under that connection.

"You are quite right," she tells her lady, a faintly humorous, wryly wary tone to her now.

Kenna curls fingers at the bend of her elbow, encouraging her to turn, meandering the two up a wide stretch of winding veranda, following the balustrade toward the north. Her eye is drawn to announcements from the east then, as a shrouded rider approaches from the main outlander road, galloping into arrival at the front pass. She stills her lady by slowing to a stop, watches the hood of a dark cloak be flipped back to reveal a rich flare of deep auburn tresses and the wild pouted face of a woman she swears she has seen before, but cannot place.

Setting a gentle hand to her lady's nearest shoulder, without once taking riveted eyes away from the newcomer, she distractedly asks, "Kenna, do you recognize that woman?"

"I'm not sure." Peering up over the hedges on her tiptoes, she brushes dark blonde locks back in unconscious gesture. "She certainly does look kin." Then glancing giddily back at her queen, "There is a sure air of scandal about her though, wouldn't you say?"

"I would not," she returns, determinately proper in her response, ignoring the innate leanings to feel the same, "I would say we know nothing of her, and therefore could not possibly think to judge the airs about her yet, whether she rode in unaccompanied on a wild wind or no."

But her impish lady-in-waiting is carried away. "Pinch me, Mary. I am properly titillated."

"Oh, Kenna. Leave it be." Sighing wearily, her head shakes as she urges the blonde off with her. "I'm sorry I even pointed her out now."

: : :

The castle kitchens are abuzz with activity when the redhead strolls in. Makes herself at home within the walls of Château d'Amboise on the river Loire, home to the French royal court in the city esteemed of Amboise, so very near Clos Lucé, a small château which housed the brilliant da Vinci some years ago, and which saw his regretful death. She would like to stop by the structure aside, merely to walk within the walls, perhaps trace her fingers across the stones and feel the memories they have imprinted themselves for. There is power in history, and stone and earth hold the history best of all, so she intends to visit. Except she has plans for this castle, for certain peoples within it, and trinket interests that shall detour her actions must wait.

"The devil's mistress stands in our midst today."

_Speaking of trinket interests_, she thinks with great mirth to herself, spinning on her heel to see a scruffy middle man of austere exterior filling up a narrow doorway to the pantries, his dark hair unkempt and overhanging an unhappy brow as an untidy beard obscures his lower face, wearing a severe expression that threatens to do unpleasant things to her. Conversely, his bad mood merely leaves her wickedly delighted. She tilts her head at him, eyeing the shabby brown robes he adorns, her own expression flitting to that of mocking distaste. She leans herself against a wooden table of workspace behind her, cluttered by pantry imperishables, her hands catching the rough edges to keep them occupied, keep from indulging impulses she would do better to resist for time being. And so she resists. Reins in.

"Hello, Damus."

"Lady Adelaide," her favorite seer rigidly returns. Favorite because unlike usual acquaintances, he finds her presence intolerably distasteful. Thinks of her as a feral pagan Scot with bile for blood and a penchant for mayhem, which perversely pleases her, provokes her to torment him with all of her affections and her teasing, and given that she _is_ rather incorrigible, finds this so childish habit a most marvelous of pastimes.

Turning from him unconcerned, she makes about the circumference of the messy workspace, rifling dancing fingertips along a scatter of items, searching idly for what she seeks. Browsing with a purposeful air of contented pleasure which makes him grind his teeth behind his locked jawline. "You haven't seen a fresh sprig of oleander near, have you?"

Ignoring that blatant baiting, he takes a stilted step forward, still scowling something fierce at the back of her, at that unruly mane of devil red curling too far too thickly down a graceful spine. "Why have you come, sorceress?"

She swivels to face him over her shoulder for a moment, her torso twisted, her hands still taken to the shelves along the far wall. Innocently, her green eyes wide, she answers perfectly honestly, "Why, to see my queen, of course."

His displeasure deepens. "When have you cared for Scottish royals?" he accuses, pushing to an edge of the table between them now. "You pay veneration to no ruler."

"Untrue. And I take offense at the assumption," she says, entirely unoffended, her shoulders up for all of half a second in feign, her lips curving at the corners with impish enjoyment after it fades. "My queen is a meritable creature with much potential." She comes from the Lowland Gypsies of her country, it is true, a people whom have never bent to knee for king or queen, but she is never so unsingular as to be incapable of parting to her own belief or behavior. And she knows such that her people do not. She knows there is something special about Mary, Queen of Scots. Knows there is much more to the young monarch than the eye sees. Knows if certain choices are made, if traits fostered properly, her reign could be outré. Legendary.

Adelaide Kinsley senses this in the stars, and intends to meddle, as is her nature.

Michel de Nostredame knows not of this prophecy, knows not these intentions, only the vision come to himself, a surety of his own future ruler's fate and the omen Lady Mary Stuart brings forth for the young _Dauphin de __Viennois_. He knows she is up to something, no greater sight necessary, and feels a need to cast her away as she lifts a small wooden basin to her stomach, stealing herself an assortment of freshest fruits from the gatherings, whistling a soft lilted tune from pursed lips as she goes about her choosing, doing her best to bother the prophet.

The last piece she claims is a crisp yellow red apple, vicing it loosely between her long fingers as she crosses past him, pausing at his side to lean in and grab his hairy chin with her other hand, shaking it to and fro for a second, her expression both sensual and mocking at once. "Be a dear, sweet Nostradamus," she purrs, her cadence saccharine taunting, as he remains stiff in her grasp, bearing her regard with hostile dignity, "Visit my chamber soon, so we may chat proper for a time I'm not so engaged."

Hard eyes sliding down to her glinting own, he coldly commands, "Unhand me, witch."

A disappointed moue shapes her face, another feign of emotion she is incapable of feeling, her features too stark and exotic to be pretty with it. Her fingers slip from him with a soft sigh and shrugging shoulders, bringing the apple to her teeth for a pointed bite, her sorceress eyes locked onto his stare, gleaming meaningfully. Without another word, she slides past him, her chest close enough to brush the arm of his dullard robe, leaving the seer locked stiff with helpless contempt. She always did know how to skillfully distress him. He knows not what she plans, what she will do with free reign through the castle, what she has hence seen or the extent of what she is capable of, but he knows an intense dislike of that woman. That red-haired temptress.

If she is caught in the castle by revelation, marked for who she is in truth, she will burn before her visit is finished. And the world shall be rid of one more troublemaking Hellene.

* * *

My Songs:  
Mary Overlooks: _Do I Wanna Know_ by Arctic Monkeys


	3. This Black Widow

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**This Black Widow  
**

_"To have servants so loyal as thee, Who kills your enemy as you sleep, And sways such darlings to your side, But caution rests with weary rite, For this black widow shall swallow your fight."_

: : :

How very busy with preparations for the winter solstice Masquerade this evening the château has been this past week. How very worth an annoyance the hectic hustle was for it to have brought this magnificence all around her to swift fruition. Mary descends the west wing wide veranda stairs step by step, one hand fisted lightly in the excesses of her billowing tiered skirts, white heaviness a template beneath overlain black ivy lace, her attentions swept up in the marvel of surroundings by sparkling lights and dancing fires, winter snowflakes and gossamer ice a central theme of the eve, rich autumn colors of every kind providing contrast wherever her eye turns. Spending the majority of her formative life in a drab unpresumptive convent with pious overly contrite ladies of the Lord, she often finds herself awed by the stunning extravagance displayed in abundance here at Court. Perhaps, she thinks, quite a many years would not be enough to desensitize her to the beauty of it, especially not so much as to take no notice of it at all, as her fellow nobility grants.

With her ladies-in-waiting as ever in attendance, fanning out in her wake to flank their queen like the insurgent approach of tacticians, she makes her way into the mingling crowd spread forth across the lavish entertainment of the west wing garden yards, set upon the rushing river bend just gone calm for the season. Before she can make her obligatory rounds, Mary is drawn to the buffet of elaborate feast appeals, put front of the gazebo of musicians filling the night with cacophonies. Appreciating the music that plays, she delicately peruses artful tiers of red strawberries, claiming a perfect ripe berry to taste. As she pinches its green stem in her fingers, bringing it up to her lips for a slow savoring bite into, her ladies disperse, drawn in different directions by different attractions, and her tongue darts out across her mouth to catch the juices which sluice, enjoying the tart sweet of its firm supple food, her eyes scanning rousing festivities behind a glittered jewel half masque. The charmed smile lighting her face is more genuine than she could have thought possible given her earlier upset, gaze gleaming with the magic of the night, and yet she has no notion of just how many souls she beguiles with that expression, how many subtle stares in rapt she draws.

"Quite the marvel, is it not?" a lilted voice pulls her from her survey, swaying to the melodies in the wintry night air, angling back towards the buffet to find the mysterious rider from this morning standing on the other side, watching the girl. Her masque is trimmer than Mary's and a deep red, crimson or carnelian like to match the almost improperly cut dress she wears, corners of it flaring outward from her emerald sloe eyes like the lick of sidewise flames. It makes her look so fiendish. The sharp flattering feline smile showing white teeth does the same.

Mary offers her own smile, more reserved, far less feline, and politely retorts, "It is. Quite."

"If I may be so bold, Your Grace," she begins, dipping slightly into a faint almost informal bow, her humble intonation conflicting with that smile, "I so have been anxious to introduce myself for some time now. My name is Adelaide."

"A very pretty one indeed."

"So they say," she murmurs, smile softening into personal amusement shared only with herself, and Mary gets the inexplicable impression she is being mocked somehow. "I too hail from our fair Scotland."

"I surmised as much," her queen comments, eyes straying briefly to the side, searching crowds a little idly, a little intently, not finding what she seeks. "You are far from home, Lady Adelaide. What brings you to France?"

The calculatingly downcast gaze skates upward at this, pinning the young queen in her place, something wild and primitive about the look in those concentrated orbs, something that threatens to take her breath away with its frightening familiarity. Clearly, startlingly bluntly, she answers her, "You do, Your Majesty."

Mary merely raises a cool black eyebrow.

The redhead straightens at last to full height and cocks her neck aside, green eyes skimming to observe the revelry around them, paying the pair no heed, or at least pretending to. "In total truth, I was visiting Orléans on family matters," she continues, her tone becoming drastically less intense, losing its edge of insinuations for mild conversational cadences. "So very near my queen, a girl I've been hearing of all my life, yet haven't been fortunate enough to behold for myself. I simply could not resist the chance."

"Are you quite sure we have never met?" her queen questions, frowning softly in doubt.

"I have never the honor, Your Grace."

"I see." But that faint frown persists. She could swear she knows this woman. With the red curls upswept into tight pins creating a crown, she looks less wild Scot and more proper lady, bound up in her corseted dress and her devilish masque, but there remains an air of rebellion about her now, as if she has never suffered a day in her life subjected to choices not her own, as if she does what it is she likes and not a single action otherwise, confines of society be damned. Her very presence is enough to make Mary secretly deeply envious, her heart practically crying out at its assumptions of this stranger, of its perceived jealousies. "Well, I am glad I could accommodate." With a gentle, nearly entirely genuine expression, she tells her subject, "I'm always eager to meet a countryman. It has been too long since I've been back."

"Ah. I believed this would be the case," her new acquaintance reveals, countenance shifting to a more determined mien as she lifts from leaning against the buffet bench, slipping a hand inside the folds of her crimson skirts. "And with such a belief, I've come with a gift for my queen."

"A gift?" the girl echoes archly, surprise overlapping suspicion as she straightens as well while the woman pulls free something concealed by the inner pockets of her attire. "What possibly for?"

Pausing in her retrieval, Lady Adelaide looks up suddenly, seeming taken aback. "You are to wed the _Dauphin de __Viennois_ soon, yes? To become _la Dauphine_. This is no rumor?" The easiness of this proclamation, as if its certainty is taken for granted, makes Mary want to fidget. But she is a better politician than that. Without waiting for her queen's confirmation, she foolhardily divulges, "Many of our people are unhappy about this alliance. For a queen regnant to take a king regnant in his own right as her consort, however much our nation may need French forces, it is never to be an ideal arrangement. Personally, I am pleased for you. For our people. I do think you will be very happy, Your Grace, if I—"

"—may be so bold," Mary cuts her off, her words clipped, and stronger than she intends them, unsure quite why this woman has gotten under her skin so easily, so swiftly, her liberties taken too unexpected to be handled by practiced response. The girl is stunned, bewildered, and so she takes a moment to collect her thoughts, her emotions, still unable to sort them out.

Seizing the hesitation, her subject turns a hand over, stretching the dainty arm over the buffet, fingers unfurling to reveal a bright fresh red apple, swirls of yellow coloring its deep shaded shape from the stem downward. "As I said, a gift," she tells her slowly, making the girl glance up askance, rightfully wary of the odd offering. Then she goes on to explain, "My family resides in the lowlands as farmers. It is said that an apple picked from the mythic Cináed lowlands is purported to possess certain mystic attributes within its core. They say it gifts one who takes an honest bite with a most invaluable vision. Reveals your deepest purest desire."

Archly skeptical, Mary inquires, "Why would I need that revealed?"

The redhead smiles once more, gently elaborative rather than sly or feline, and softly claims, "We often see what we want, Your Grace, but what we _need_ is a harder truth to discern."

"Desire is not need."

"All due reverence, Your Grace," she counters, head bowing just so, "I beg to differ."

Mary spends a long deliberating moment studying the exotic face before her, searching facets from across the buffet spread, lights and flame dancing enigmatic shadows through her features. She knows this woman, she knows she does, beyond all rhyme or reason, beyond remembrance. But it will not come to her. Then her eyes slide low to the offered apple extended on a long palm. The ultimate symbol of sin.

And she reaches out and takes it.

Never in her life has she been permitted to be of the mind that taking consumption from hand was allowed, never taken a bite that hadn't been tested and sanctioned, so grave were the threats to her life since birth, since being crowned regnant queen at nine months into life, inheriting it as heir apparent at merely six days of infancy when her beloved father King James V died post battle, known fondly to his people as King of the Commons.

What is she doing? Has she been mesmerized by the Masquerade or this unruly Scotswoman? All she knows is something has overcome her, making her feel peculiar, making her feel wonderful in the magical winter night. As if nothing could touch her. As if she could fly. Unhindered by issues of reality or its grim constrictions, she clasps the fruit gingerly within her fingers, a strawberry stem falling to her skirt hems, and brings the offering up to her red lips. Across the buffet, her subject is smiling encouragingly at the young queen, grateful and mystic herself in nature, looking on as she moves through some woven spell she can't be bothered by.

But then those sparkling green eyes skate sideways away, and Mary follows with her own gaze, finding that which diverted her focus. And when she glances back again, Lady Adelaide is gone as if carried incorporeally on the breeze, nothing but dancing flames in her wake, misting her vision, obscuring the trail of her disappearance. _A very strange stranger indeed_.

"Your Grace," he says on approach, sidling up beside her so suddenly that she startles, his tone light with playful humor and the warmth of an earnest affection, bringing the unbitten apple from her poised mouth to turn his way, just so he may tease her with a mock scandalized expression, admonishing mildly, "Where is your taster?"

"Taken holiday, apparently," she retorts without hitch, playing right back at him, her lips fixed by the unstoppable bloom of a bright smile to match his own. "Sebastian." Head tilting, she says, "I'm very glad to see you."

"As you should be," he staunchly returns, fingers slipping so barely along her own as he steals her apple from her grasp and brings it up for his own bite. Chomping shortly, his stern expression melts into its usual mirth, silvery eyes flashing with a cheeky eyebrow arch, and he tells the queen, "We wouldn't want our most honored guest keeling over poisoned, now would we?" Leveling her with a pointed onceover, he adds, "Especially in such a pretty dress."

"You are incorrigible," she exclaims, smothering the laugh vibrating up her chest but not able to completely stifle the smile fighting for dominance on her face as she tries to feign disapproval. "And you wear no masque. You're risking wrath of the spirits, you know."

"Risk in moderation is good for the soul, lovely Mary."

His voice is lowered to take such an intimate liberty, his body leaning in ever so slightly to hers as he does, and she feels a shiver of pleasure at the glint of his eyes fixed as intensely as always on her and her alone. Those eerie cerulean eyes. As if once she enters his awareness, all the rest of his great world contracts until all that remains is the girl before him. Perhaps this is the reason he has become such a friend so swiftly to her, his eyes and the way they focus on her, all the things which lurk behind them, admiration and faith and protection and some so unexplainable trustworthiness that hides in every cheeky quip and banter, in every wry cock of his brow, every slight smile and his subtly measuring stare. There is a strong observant quality to him, a wise quiet that draws her near, hidden below the exterior of a too charming rogue.

Yes. This is why she feels the pull she does to him, a tug in her core, in the very essence of her.

"Perhaps you are correct," she carefully concedes, swallowing away the thickness of tension in her throat as she speaks, shaking off the existentialism of mood to lose herself in their so treasured balance of behaviors. Leaning in alike, her smile turns liquid dark with edge, feline as the redhead having slipped away like magic, her big hazel eyes getting a gleam. As they come close, she snakes her hand down his wrist into his own, stealing back her gifted apple, and pulls away to take a bite, crisping it off with a pointed turn. Lashes flashing up with meaning, her lips quirk into a smirk at his challenging glance, swiveling around and gliding away.

A mystic apple from the Cináed lowlands. Quite an intriguing treat.

The refrain of scores transitions into a dramatic waltz as she makes her way through the maze of carousing courtiers. Her fair betrothed makes his appearance before her path, bowing playfully, his smile sunshine and meadows. A little boy bursting with joy. The sight stirs a similar sentiment in her own temperament and she mirrors his mien. When he offers his hand, requesting her dance, she takes the clasp and lets him lead her onto the stretch of riverside platform, lets him pull her to a structured frame of closeness before they commence. They waltz rotations around the arena, murmuring innocent flirtations, almost giddy in their newly conflict freed union. From periphery, soon she becomes aware of a ripple of tension on the fringe of the celebrations, revolving around the king and his advisors, her eyes going discreetly to vile Queen Catherine below her water arbor, her pet seer Nostradamus at her side as ever, whispering prophecies in her ear, plotting alongside his monarch for nefarious means. Does the wicked woman still seek her misfortune, she wonders? Perhaps even her death? The castle is full of Catherine's spies and there would be no shortage of those she could compel or coerce into doing her bidding behind the king. Bidding such as another attempt at driving the Scottish queen regnant from her kingdom, by ruin or secret assassination, for Mary has come to understand by her time here at Court that the French queen consort will be stopped by no principle from achieving her ambitions. Such is the foul nature of an upstart Medici, if she is to believe what she is told. The frown creasing her brow as she thinks these thoughts may give her away, but her suspicions are all but common knowledge regardless, and she feels safest here in the arms of her fiancé. Unfortunately, such a security has proven in the past to be illusion, but she will cling to it still, comforting herself in times she is powerless to do otherwise.

Dancing with Francis is an adequate distraction from her concerns, for as fleetingly as it lasts, until he is taken from her again, beckoned away by his father. Reluctantly, apology in his eyes and firm line of his mouth, he spins her outward from him to part gracefully, but she gets caught again on turn against a strong chest from the other direction, her fingers slipping free of Francis only to be taken an instant later, clasped stably by another warm hand, one of larger and rougher texture. Her eyes slide up under black lashes to meet a handsome face she just parted very recently from. Francis has such soft lovely hands. Sebastian's hands, she finds, are calloused and strong of touch. He grips her gently, of course, but the strength is there none the less.

"Hello again, Your Grace." His grin is lit with a secretive sort of jest just for her.

Mary breathes out at his presence, exhaling away the knotted dark thoughts taken hold of her, saying his name on that very same sigh. "Bash." Then archly, "Haven't you tired of me yet?"

One hand holding her own to the side of them, his other curves her waist to splay the small of her back and support her as they fall into step with the rest of the dancers, waltzing smoothly away to the magic of musicians. "I fear such an occurrence will prove impossible."

And just so easily, all the air leaves her fast, makes her relaxed body gather itself up in surprise, in thick molten pleasure and something else, something far more unsettling like true honest fear, although she fails to comprehend its source or reasoning. She has done well throughout the span of their acquaintance at turning a blind eye and deaf ear to the undercurrent of insinuations at his every word, his every longing look about him, at his quick formed seemingly unwavering devotion. But there are times…

There are times she almost wishes the die were of a different cast altogether.

For the evening, Mary will be contented as she is, as all things stand. She must be. There is no other choice for a disadvantaged queen. She will be contented by existing beneath the gaze of his silvered eyes, clear crystalline blue by breathtaking intensity, by silent fever binding great passion below the surface of his perfect veneer. She will be contented to dance. Finding safety and solace in his steady confident hold. She also finds, after a moment or so of dancing this way, held securely by his broad taller frame, how she quite likes the contrast of that roughness of those large hands against her so soft skin. Perhaps enjoys it more than she rightly should. But though she may school her features against revelation, she cannot prevent the physiological reaction of her body to such unexpected unwelcome sensation, prevent the way her nerves are titillated and her muscles melt free of tension within his grasp. Or the shiver ghosting up her spine.

"Are you chilled?" he asks, concern creasing his brow.

Mary swallows, shakes her head, words unbecoming of her station threatening to spill forth, and so she presses her lips pursed and says nothing. Unsure of what those words wanting out now actually are. She forces a shaky smile, falling short of the reassuring self-possession she so seeks, but he pretends it is there, pretends unawares of the disconcerting mood fallen upon her tonight. They separate then to circle together as the score suggests, as the dancers surrounding them do, turned face to face as their bodies angle, their palms held up by their shoulders mere inches apart, mirroring one another in motion as they rotate, never quite touching. Their eyes are locked again and the force of this intimate connection has her breath stolen once more. Has her horribly unable to break away. If prying eyes are drawn upon them, neither notice, and if such an obliviousness for the world around them causes scandal to ripple with dangerous undertones through the gathering all around, neither are aware. Nor do they care.

* * *

My Songs:

Kinsley Temptation: _Black Widow_ by Susanne Sundfør  
Mash Dance: _Raise The Dead_ by Rachel Rabin


	4. And Then I Weep

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**And Then I Weep**

_"I lose sleep, I lose sleep, For too much I have seen, And then I weep."_

: : :

Captivating. She has him captivated. Fascinating. He has her fascinated.

The ethereal young queen takes to her balcony late into the nightfall, folded forearms resting atop the smooth balustrade bordering the edge, hers standing stark from the like, separated by a good distance from the other extensions for her protection, for her isolation. Her hair is loosed, flowing down the graceful bow of her back in a silken black waterfall of spirals, her feet bared to the stone beneath her. The thin gossamer shift adorning her fine body drapes liberally off her form as she slants, looking out over the shadowed land, azure moonlight filtering through the fabric to silhouette soft contours beneath. Hazel eyes gaze out over glimmering midnight waters.

A presence approaches from behind, coming close so she may feel the faint kiss of his heat on her exposed skin, pale and shimmery under the moon. Tentative fingers caress downward by backs along her spine, finding the fastenings of her dressing gown, unbinding the twined laces with slow confident strokes, guiding its hem as his fingers graze up her shoulder blade and over the curve, encouraging the gossamer covering to slip free of her frame, pooling around her feet at stone. Once completely bared, she shuts her eyes and shudders softly at the cool touch of the night air, and his warm hands encompass her arms, skimming down to press thumbs to each of her wrists before rising up again and across the set of her shoulders to stray lower, mapping the dips and arc of her spine, fitting palms to the swell of her hips, fingers digging firmly into her flesh, pulling her back against a broad chest uncovered. His touches are precise fingers leaving precise marks in her where another would be made impulsive by his passion.

_I wish you were the one_, she thinks so vehemently she hears her heart beating it word for word against the cage of her ribs. He brushes the thick of her inky curls aside, hooked to one shoulder, so he may press his mouth unhindered to the taut junction of her throat as it meets the shoulder, his breath whispering into her soul. _Do you feel what I feel? Like I am burning alive._ He has gotten himself insinuated into her head, into her body, imprinting himself on her nerves and her needs. Somehow. She never wanted this. She never knew.

Bending at the knee, he brackets his arms at the angles of her, sweeping her off her feet into his embrace, carrying her away. They pitch into the oppressive darkness of her bedchamber before she can see his face, unilluminated by the glow of a blue moon, and he sets her down to the length of her canopy, blanketing her body with his own just evanescently flush. His hands upon her flesh, her every soft curve, skimming the contours of what defines her, such a glorious experience still, his features stolen from her vision but his touch very so distracting. If only she could see his face. He must kiss her now or she might go mad.

Thighs curving to hook at his either hip as he sinks against her, he brings himself to the side, rolling her on top of him, seated astride his lap, her fingertips digging for grip into the rippled muscular definition of his torso, his wide palms grazing up the bow of her back as she arches there. Rather than lay flat in the darkness, he yearns upright for her, striving towards her exposed throat, his mouth marking fires to every spot it meets, fine stubble of his beard bristling across her skin to leave red stinging streaks where it goes, her long fingers falling to his jaw as he makes her head drop back in delirium, overtaken by the brush of his tongue and his lips along the graceful column, edging lower past her pronounced collarbone, over the milky swell of each breast as they wait for his attentions. She is panting for breath and begging for something she cannot possibly fathom to put to words in demand but knows she must have it soon or else she might die of this unbearable and agonizingly sweet torment he lavishes upon the innocent young queen.

There is heat and sparks that zing along her nerve endings, heated liquid like molten lava as it courses her veins, coiling tightly inside of her, bundling into a buildup of intolerable aching and an unfulfilled throbbing of some primitive inexplicable prime directive. The assault of her senses is so breathtakingly dizzying she feels she might cry. Or cry out. Her hard won royal composure is felled into tatters, unraveling like her mind, like her body beneath his mercurial merciless ministrations. This pursuit is madness. Utter madness. Who would ever in sound mind give into such dangerous uncontrollable desires? Not her. She mustn't ever. She … she cannot.

The man that is her undoing pulls back from his impassioned tasks, his fervent ardor for her, rugged features coming into a shaft of light from the illuminating moon outside, stunning her into sudden seized stillness. His face is as she has never seen before, overcome by a drugging heartfelt sweep of covetousness, of craven hunger and darkly yearning appetite, his familiar intensity gone to strange new heights, leaving her gripped breathless and intoxicated beneath the pressure of it. Those eyes … crystalline eyes taken silvered azure like something otherworldly. Lit from within by a ravaging fire. Burning desire.

"Bash," she breathes, his name stolen from sound by the crushing clasp of his lips to hers.

: : :

Hazel eyes snap open, sharply jarring upward from flat on her back in her bed in the darkness, her mind jolted violently awake. Wrenched from its druggedly dreaming slumber. The force of her sudden unexplainable longing hits the girl so hard that it steals her breath away. Leaves her hollow in acute piercing emptiness. Bereft of nothing yet everything.

Her gaze goes to the bedside oak stand across the canopy, where a ripe red apple still sits as she left it there, marred by two precise bites on either side of its heartly shape. Her mind spins in disorienting circles. Certainties abound while not a solitary one slows enough for her to grasp and comprehend for her own. The only thing that lingers unmistakably is the impression of heat licking along her cool untouched skin, of the awesome pressure from stark silver eyes seeing deep inside her soul, startling by their intensity. Their reverence.

Across the castle, buried back from sight within the far northeast wing of residence quarters, lies the bastard brother of a worthy prince. He comes up from sleep with the very same jolt as she. Lashes flashing up, he swings his legs over an edge and bends as if under a great burden of weight when his hand scrubs haggardly over his sweat slick face. Tired into deeper exhaustion by his rest than he had before he bedded down for night. Unknowingly echoing the fair queen as he breathes softly but heavy with feeling, "Oh … _no_."

On the other end of Château d'Amboise of royal reside, embedded safely in a southeast wing for important but short term hosted guests of Court, a wicked red-haired lady from fair Scotland stands before her wide oak planning table, cluttered since her unpacking by pivotal belongings. Items she might be tried for heresy if the wrong eyes should set upon the sorts. Not as she worries. For she worries for scarce few things in this life. Mostly she plots, and aspires, and designs grand games of chess where kings and queens and rogues and stable boys all play pawn to her whim. And none ever know it.

Adelaide is a force to be reckoned but her strength lies in only being seen, only being known when that is as she designed, and this tactic has served her well. Adelaide tempers whichever way the blasted wind will blow.

Gazing into her scrying basin, she stirs the crystal water with fingertips and splashes drops off to the side of her workspace as the swirling image represented before her morphs into another, mimicking the previous almost to an exact mirror. Damp fingers to her lips in wry contemplation, she is merely considerate in her cunning as she murmurs, "Interesting."

Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. Sebastian de Poitiers, Bastard Brother to the doomed Dauphin. Gentle oblivious Mary Stuart. Poor girl. She has no notion of what lay ahead. What the stars have in store for her. It appears not a fairly pretty path.

Temptation always was fated to be the greatest threat to her reign.

* * *

My Songs:  
Mash Dream: _In My Head_ by Loreen


	5. Lost To That Which Haunts Us

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**Lost To That Which Haunts Us**

_"As I am lost to that which haunts us, Stolen by the trickery of those who aim after our demise, Shall I follow your signs, Right back to my heart."_

: : :

The dream is upon her once more. Plaguing her rest. The warm wet blood cakes her cold hand, fingers furling strongly into its stickiness, her lip caught by her teeth, biting to the point of pain in her so tightly coiled anxiety. Her quietly debilitating dread. She thought this was over. But here it is again. Staining her hand red. Her ruling hand. Marring her royal ring. The crimson creeps inside every crevice of her exalted family crest to obscure its insignia. Its prominence. She wants to shake it off her. Wash it away. She wants to run. Turn and run and never look back. Needs to escape this opulent prison caging her in from all sides. Crushing her into shapes she should not become.

"Little Mary. Where have you gone, my child?"

That voice. She knows that voice. Pulling away from the window, Mary spins to face the dark behind her, surprised to find she is no longer alone. Someone is approaching from the corridor by low candlelight. Their shadow casts figures upon the stone when they round the corner to come upon her chamber doors, left ajar so recklessly, an entire castle of nothing but forgotten ghosts to keep company to the young queen.

"You know this game is forbidden, my little Mary. You mustn't hide to be sought when so many seek you to do harm."

But she is not playing children games. Certainly not that one. The girl looks about herself with a good deal of confusion. The shadow is nearing, coming closer, close enough for the candle held in one wrinkled hand to illuminate passing impressions of an old face. Shock precedes relief then ardent joy in abundance at the revelation of presence.

"Sister Gràinne!" she exclaims, hazel eyes wide, before she throws herself forward in her excite to fling arms about her most beloved guardian. The first friendly face to welcome a petrified little girl of a queen regnant into a convent she was consigned within for protection and concealment without a single familiar soul to hold her hand or reassure her fear. If the elderly woman had not seen to die on deathbed at the eve of the girl's thirteenth day of birth, she would not have been able to tear herself from the convent when time arrived to return to French Court and reunite with her betrothed. Held to the back of her guardian, her fingers still clench, seeping revealing crimson from their seams. Ignoring this plague, she shuts her eyes and squeezes firmer, devoting herself to the hug in exclusion of everything else.

Unfortunately, she is taken hold by the arms and pulled from her young unrestrained embrace, held away from the elder to be faced with a grim set of expression and eyes severe. "Listen to me, my child. You must leave from here."

"Gràinne—"

"You must go, Mary. You _must_."

"I … I cannot possibly." Head shaking, she sends black rivers of hair swaying about her as she is fixed between two points, between two overpowering desires. "I must wait here. This is my place, Gràinne. This is where I belong."

"No," her guardian rejects, gripping her tighter, rattling her to and fro only once in her intent. "It is not safe for you in this place, my child. Forces conspire against you here," she softly confides, her words cautious whispers, looking about them to the shadows which linger all around, a dark to have eyes and ears and malicious intentions, "And they are many. Too powerful to ward against. You must escape this tainted hollow at once, my Mary. You must go home."

"There is nothing awaiting me there but failure, Gràinne." Her resistance is wearing. She feels the need to flee grow stronger each time the elder utters her insistence. "You must understand. Whatever storms may come, I have no choice but to weather them my best. To claim defeat and banish myself back to Scotland would mean ruin for my reign. For my people."

"Mary—"

"_No_." Detaching herself from her impassioned guardian, she reluctantly steps away, her face shuttering from emotion, wrapping duty around her like a cloak against the wind threatening to turn her to ice, and she returns to the prism window. Gazes out through the distorted glass to find but more shadows beyond. One more touch to the rippled surface would prove to drip with blood, she knows, and so she keeps her hands clasped before her tightly. "This is the path I have chosen. This is the path chosen for me. The only one possible to take. To do anything other would mean to me and everything I hold in highest regard a fate I will not welcome. A fate I _refuse_ to bring about. Believe me, Gràinne, I do know the danger. I am perfectly aware of the blade which hangs above my neck. I _will not_ yield." Features stony, she takes a breath, resolve forming once more over itself. Arch and superior with cool fire, she oaths, "They wish to abrogate me? Let them come."

Silence stretches through the chamber. From behind her, Gràinne takes a step forward, a hand landing gently to her slender shoulder, fragile fingers squeezing encouragingly. The cadence now, when she speaks, has altered dramatically from its prior urgency. Her gravel tone is turned solemn and strong. "There it is. You've found your fight." And then, "Good girl. You will need it."

Just so sudden, she is thrust from the cushion of her world of dream, shoved violently back into herself amidst a jarring scare of reality. Eyes flashing open, she sees a glimpse of gleaming steel in flickering flame, a slim blade of the dagger coming toward her, pitching down into her canopy for her chest from above, a knee propped on the edge of her bed that most certainly does not belong, a strange silhouette shrouded ahead. With a startled scream, Mary lurches backward from laying, her back slamming against the oak at the head, her legs jerking out on reflex, catching him hard in the stomach, knocking him off the edge just in time to avoid the downswing slice of his killing tool on its way to her heart.

Gripped in instinct and reaction, she rolls over the opposite end, slipping free of bedding that threatens to tangle her limbs and cost her life, scrambling madly across the floor away as he rises to pursue, still intent in his goal. Leaping over the canopy, he comes down upon her quicker than she can gather reason enough to plan course, her body dropping hard into the stone beneath her against his advance, her hand coming to grip the brass of a candlestick bedside without her notice of its accord. Not until she realizes she is driving the light up into him as he lunges, burning flame, dripping wax, bronzed metal and all. As the fire meets his face, hot wax giving under the pressure she forces up into his eye, her assailant becomes victim, his entire existence shifting from predator to horrified agonized innocent as he hurls back from the cornered queen, howling insanely in his so mad dismay. Her body follows him upward with no ration, keeping the candle to him for as long as she can before it drops, scattering across the floor when he topples over the canopy to crash at the other side, limbs flailing askew in hysteria, clutching at his ruined eye as he screams his alarm. It is by far the most macabre sight she has lain eyes to.

Frozen, gaze wide, she watches the man backpedal too far in his agitation, stumbling out onto her open balcony before hitting the barrier of the balustrade with such careless momentum as to send him flipping right over into a fatal fall.

Amidst the deafening silence which follows, Mary finds herself strangely benumbed in shock. In disbelief. Distractedly, she casts her sight about the chamber, absorbing the mess of its disarray. Feeling the resultant emotions through a thick muffling shield of removal. Is this surreal theatric perhaps part of the dream still? That is the most reasonable assumption, of course, and she is apt to take it as it is and go back to bed. But soon the paralysis fades, mere moments from his plunge, so she is thrust forward once more, jolted to movement by extreme distress and urging panic into fleeing for the hall.

"Guards! _Guard_!" she calls out for help, running down the darkened corridor, spinning circles in her bewildered desperation, finding no one. Three protectors should be posted on duty tonight. At all times. And yet how many occasions since arriving in Amboise has she found herself all alone? Always at the crux of danger. It is becoming pure madness. Such blatant disregard of her standing is inconceivable. It must be _her_. _Catherine_. It _has_ to be. Who else has such sway over the castle? Who else could keep contriving these instances for her death? _Yet another English plot, my dear_. Yes, certainly, such is what she shall hear, if she survives this night.

Faltering, she freezes at the silhouette of approaching figures rounding the corner as it flickers across stone of the far end of the hall, where her feet were taking her. Panic and paranoia swelling in her distress, clutching her tightly, she presses fingers to her open mouth, overtaken by fear that makes her backpedal, disappearing back inside her chambers before they can see her. They could have been more assassins. They could be coming for her now. That thought grips her like a fist as she falls back against the chamber door, one hand over her hammering heart as the other stifles her mouth from sound, straining to decide. She must make a choice. She must do _something_ one way or another. She must get to safety. Somewhere. Find…

But no. That is a silly thought. An utterly irrational thought stricken for her fright. Find Francis. That is the thought she should have. He will see to her protection. She knows he will. And yet…

Eyes casting about the chamber, Mary finds herself driven to action, to reckless impetuousness in vein of self-preservation above all. _Go, my child. Run_. She hears it in her head, pushing at her to do its bidding from the inside, from her very primal instincts, a biological imperative. _You must go_. _Leave this place_. Her heart hammers. Her ears ring. _Get out. Get out. Go!_

And so she goes. As footsteps near her door, she sweeps across the rooms, snatching her cloak off a chair she passes, and the dagger off the floor by her bed her would be assassin had dropped, sliding behind the dressing screen at the far corner of her bedchamber and pressing the trap door, delving into the terrifying darkness of the secret tunnel beyond. She fastens her riding cloak about her neck and tucks the stolen dagger into an inner pocket as she runs, hurrying along stretches of narrow stone and bedrock, taking turns and veering by reflex, praying she makes it out of here. And she does. Eventually. And she keeps going.

At the stables, she sneaks unseen into the stall of her midnight Arabian, saddling him swiftly in light of the moon, stepping into the stirrups, swinging over, kicking him into motion to get going, fleeing on the king's road from her haunting. Her pretty prison. She does not think. She does not doubt. She rides, racing faster and faster against the whipping winter wind that strikes her cheeks, blowing her cloak hood off her raven tresses, its skirts dancing furiously in her wake as she hunkers and hurries onward, gripping the reins with white knuckles. This is good. This is right. This is a first she has felt free since boarding her coach at the convent for France.

But she is Mary, Queen of Scots, and she is never truly free.

The oppression gives chase, following her from Château d'Amboise, pursuing her like a rabbit on the run rather than the wild unstoppable thing she keeps buried inside her so smothered spirit. A voice filters through the whistling cacophony. The rushing of her mindless drive. Calling for her. Calling her name. _Mary! Mary. Mary!_ Suddenly she hears the hoof beats as well, approaching rapid and fierce, striving to reach her, steadily closing their distance despite all her determined speed to the contrary. Trying to escape them, or just plain escape, she cuts the reins and veers the stallion sharply off the king's road into the trees, weaving and leaping over obstacles that lay in their path, still unable to lose her hunter.

May she never be safe and welcome in this world? May she never be loved?

A rider overtakes her, cutting off her path so abruptly her horse bucks in panic, hiking upward onto its hindquarters with a shrill whinny of protest and throwing her loose with a startled shout. She hits the ground hard and rolls, all the air knocked from her lungs, her body gone into shock by the blunt force of impact and the resultant dizziness making her dull. There is that voice again as it slashes through the thick of her daze, ferocious agitation replaced by deep worry, strong hands on her arms hauling her from the dirt. One of those hands going to her jaw, brushing it clear as a first still vices her elbow, keeping her standing through her swaying, she registers unkempt brown hair and eerie eyes shining through the darkness at her in contrite concern.

"I am beyond foolish," he curses, and runs on without hitch, "Mary, Mary, are you injured?"

His fingers still caringly to her cheek, grounding her slowly back to reality by touch, she shakes her head from side to side with little jerks, dazedly, uncomprehendingly, struggling to find breath. To find herself. She is out of sorts. She is out of her mind. What is she doing? Where is she going? Nothing makes sense this eve. There are a million questions in need of answer but what she asks is, "How are you here?"

"The east stables overlook my terrace. I saw your run."

"You came for me." She doesn't know what she is saying. Her mind is elsewhere.

The man senses this. It troubles him. "Mary." Both hands pressing to her face now, forcing her to look at him, look him square in the eye, his eerie blue eyes, gone gravely serious. "Mary, tell me what has happened."

Hazel eyes snap at last to his steady penetrating stare, stark and paled, parted lips trembling when she says, "He was in my room, Bash. He was in my bed." Her melodic voice is drawn rough by ragged emotion half controlled, low and guttural in its exposed rasp, a sob rising from her chest to lodge somewhere in her throat without release. Filling her with pressure. "He had a knife."

The hands on her tighten bruisingly, crushingly, a hard flex of reaction before he softens them, mindful of not hurting her even as his expression darkens dangerously, stonily, his concern shifting to a fierce and deadly calm. Moving his grip calculatedly down from her cheeks to settle gently at her elbows over the swaddling cloak, he softly queries, "Who was in your room, Mary?"

Bothered out of her stern senses, she looks wildly when she says, "I think he is dead."

This quiets him, caught in consideration, working out what she has told him while he studies her state by intent inspection. Turned grim with what he finds, he hooks an arm around her and tries to urge her toward the idling horses. "We must leave these woods, Your Grace."

"No!" she exclaims with a sudden burst of vehemence, breaking away from his grasp to stand her ground against the notion. Backing from him, unsoothed by the placating hands he holds up, she reaches blindly outward for the reins of her mount, two instincts warring inside her between running and staying, between fleeing for unachievable freedom or clinging to the refuge found in his presence. "I can't go back there, Sebastian. I can't."

"Mary," he pleads, creeping closer every inch she takes away in her unreason, advancing as he would on a wounded wild animal being cornered for the kill. Her resistance wavers, weakening so the nearer he gets, swayed sooth by the piercing focus of his promise filled eyes. "Mary, you must listen to me. On my honor, I will not let any harm come to you below that roof. I give you my word. But we must go back."

"Bash…"

"I promise," he whispers, a reverence in his tone, in his gaze, in his every breath that begins to break her heart, "I will protect you. I will _always_ protect you."

_But you didn't_, her head protests, more hurt and despairing than accusing, except the words won't pass her lips, not beneath the concentrated intensity of his passionate attention. _You didn't. You weren't there_.

And despite the assured knowledge from that deep innate unspoken place inside of the girl, the knowledge that he wasn't there this time and he won't be there the next either, she goes still, allows him to reach her, hands clasping her shoulders, pulling her in close, safe within his arms for whatever fleeting moments they are granted. She has her head buried in his chest and her fingers locked around his wrist when their bodies stiffen together, each sensing something outer amiss by their intuitions, each registering the unformed threat at once. Though her mind is still clouded to a point of confusion, suddenly uncertain of her standing on this earth, unsure of what she knows or believes or who she should be, she feels distinctly watched. In some ominous assured way that has her skin crawling and a chill shivering up her spine. The unbidden unquestionable divination that something wicked this way comes.

Tense with wary, Bash firms his grip on her, clenching tightly in warning, half in protectiveness, saying softly at her ear, "Someone is coming."

Just as softly, she whispers against his throat in poised urgency, "We need to go."

"Yes, we do." His fingers bite into her shoulders, however unconsciously, urging her strongly to the nervous horses. He hoists her atop her saddle without hesitation, without request, fisting reins in his hand, wrapping them at hers, slapping her stallion into motion. She is aware in her periphery as she surges into a gallop of his hurry over his own, of his follow, until their progress is stymied by a sharp clap of thunder in the black sky overhead that spooks the horses. "Mary!"

Her name on his lips is the last she hears before she is thrown once more to the ground from her unstrapped saddle. The blitz occurs so suddenly she has trouble tracking what has happened until afterward. After all is said and done. All she remembers is the violent crush of hitting ground, of the rush of air stolen from her body, of the stars that dance across her vision, blackening sight. The thunder is not what threw her. That was the arrow whizzing past to embed into a passing tree, an arrow that clipped flying tendrils of her hair it flew so close, her body flinging itself backward, making her mount react badly, sending her rolling off its hind. First it was the horse driven to halt from its path by an abrupt appearance of another, forcing it kicking up, and then the arrow loosed manages the rest.

Knowing her life may very well depend on her will of not giving into the consuming darkness, she rolls from the fall, not permitting herself a moment for recovery, a wince and a gasp not able to keep her down, coming up to knees and palms first then staggering to her feet and backward, avoiding the swipe of a blunt weapon like the bulky hilt of a rusted cutlass swung in her direction. Her steps get tangled in her cloak hem and she stumbles into a fall, not quite collapsing but folly enough to prevent evasion of the next strike taken. Blade hits blade before it can touch the girl, breathless brutal Sebastian armed by sword from the scabbard hung at his hip, catching weapon and parrying it hard away from her before he follows with a vicious offensive toward the shadow of an assailant attached to its haft. Ripping free of her cloak, she is up and at his back only in time to miss the whishing disappearance of their enemy.

"Bash," she says breathily, emotionally, an errant hand alighting at the small of his spine for her own irrational comfort. Her voice filled with fear and passion and shock makes him sidle backward in his rigid stance, pressing into her close, his eyes scanning the shrouded woods for glimpse of his elusive quarry, sword still held poised for attack. She feels as if she will unravel at any second now. As if at the precipice of one too many dangers will prove her undoing. When no movement arises in those next crucial beats to follow, expression battle grim and tense, he reaches behind blindly and grips her arm without care to his strength, dragging her with him toward his fretting mount. He is alert enough for the two of them but it is she who sees the strike coming. She who shouts out his name in panicked warning. Just a second too late. "_Bash_!"

The hilt takes his head by the back and propels him facefirst into the soil at their feet unaware. His body goes limp. His sword clasped loosely around lax fingers. Mary screams, seeing him down, falling toward him in an intense spike of worry, so overwhelming in its fervor as to unfocus all else. Including any present danger to herself. Of which there is much of, she realizes, looking upward at a shrouded sinister silhouette towering above them, her eyes moist and her fingers clinging tightly to the fabric at his back. Praying he wakes.

_Young girls. Royals. Queens. Do not leave the castle alone._

If only she had listened…

* * *

My Songs:  
Mary Attack: _Light Em Up_ by Fall Out Boy.

_Author Note: I'm so relieved a few people enjoyed it. I hope this one doesn't disappoint too badly. (Oh, and please do feel free to point out any mistakes you notice. I don't have enough time in the day to proofread.)_


	6. All That is Left of My Clarity

.

**All That is Left of My Clarity**

_"If it be not you I may hold to, My fate has been sealed, For you be my sanity, All that is left of my clarity."_

: : :

The apothecary is empty and quiet when she arrives. Entering without invite with a whoosh of regal skirts swaying about her feet and an air of stormy restraint preceding her presence, red hair unbound and wild in its curls as they fall across her shoulders, down the bow of her stiffened back. She is fierce and statuesque as a queen, ever commanding her domain, and proves impossible for the prophet to avoid. Try as he might.

"Where is my queen, Damus?" she asks once she locates him, cool as ice, no preamble to call, deadly casualness and lethal accusation wrapped in one slow drawl with deceptively mild melody. Since the gory corpse of a visiting Englishman was discovered at dawn fallen beneath her window, his face set gruesomely aflame and his neck broken, her chambers vacant and the young Queen of Scots unfound, the castle has been in an uproar of quiet but epic proportions. Kept from common gossip of the Court for now, it is only a matter of time before word spreads, if the queen is failed to be found. The repercussions of such a heinous act will be dire. The good king is flummoxed and his heir irate with worry. There will surely be sum of an international incident should Mary of Guise hear of this. And when her scrying fails her, she is first to rely on more substantial means, if not less convenient ones. "You know more than the rest of them. You always do."

"Is this you asking for my sight?" he questions uninterestedly, not looking up from his precision with needle and thread as he sews closed a most garish stab wound across the paunch abdomen of a sickly invalid unconscious on his table. "Has yours failed you, Lady Adelaide?"

He is all deriding contempt thinly veiled by innocuous inquiry. Normally she might play along, might enjoy doing so, but today her patience is frayed. Lips pursing tight into a smile, teeth gritted behind them, she cants her head and wings a red eyebrow where she stands at the open archway to his private laboratory, sending him sailing into the wall nearest his back with a mindful impulse, pinning him there with a pointed punishing squeeze of her lifted fingers, as if holding a live heart in her hand, as if fisting around its juicy meat. This is the technique she imagines to work her will, to maneuver him how she likes with only the power of her thoughts, of her magick.

"I will not ask again, _fortuneteller_."

Choking on his strangled words as the invisible force of her ire constricts his airway, he swears, "I had nothing to do with this plot."

Stepping forward, her skirts swishing in the sand marring stone of his den, ignoring the dying man beside her, she tightens her furled fingers just so. Lessening intensity, she liltedly challenges, "Yet you know precisely what it is I speak of."

"I've seen."

"Yes." Her fingers ease and with them the strain on his throat. "I suppose you have."

Releasing the beleaguered healer with absent flick of her wrist, she turns away with a whip of her dress in consideration, pacing a circle for only a heartbeat before wheeling back around to his reddened face with a new investment of expression. A new approach. Which brings along with it a more amiable mood towards the famed seer, if not a demeaning one in effortless condescension, paying no heed to the aggrievedly unhappy look about him as his rubs his abused neck and stiffens straight from the sloppy slump she dropped him to his feet by, nor to the glare he levels her way. Licking her lips, she cranes her neck aside, eyeing him in measure.

"You will do a reading for me then." Her steps advance towards him. He arches unconsciously into the wall at his back to be away from her, wary as he is, but she ignores this in favor of sensuous predatory appeal exuding her every arc. "I would like to hear your thoughts on a matter I've given a great deal of deliberation towards."

"I will do no such thing." He summons backbone, deadpanned but no less insulting. "_Witch_."

Adelaide only smiles prettily.

: : :

"Please," she cries again, more frustrated than pitiable by now, struggling against her confines, knotted rope chafing the skin free of her wrists, bound before her as they are. The sun has come to cast sparkling daylight across the forest and the blood which soaks the earth is made even more macabre without the softness of shadows to dull the scene.

They mutter and curse her in a language she has never heard before, laughing at her distress, slurring her so obviously by their sneers if not their unintelligible words. As her continued protests go ignored, she is tugged forward so roughly she trips, stumbling over her own feet and her dress, ragged and stained as it becomes, a hand snatching the bind between her wrists to drag her along. When she tries to pull at resistance, she makes the man hauling her spin, fisting big meaty paws in her attire about her chest and hefting her straight up off the ground, slamming her hard down into the slab of smoothed rock at the center of their encampment so she winces, silenced from the hiss of air knocked from her body at the force.

It appears to be a worshipping altar of some sort. The black bedrock carved into a tomb to lie. She is spread flat on her back along its length, her bound wrists wrenched above her head to hook the twine at a jagged tip of the rock jutting out at the top, her legs left loose but laid limp below. One of the sneering men, smiling with malice down at her, he trails the sharp tip of his blade up from her stomach to the bare delicate skin of her collar and higher still, brushing it over her throat to make her shiver, make her twist her head away with dignity, eyes closing against the wetness in their depths, leaking despite her efforts from their corners, her lips pressed tight with her fear and bridled despair. She has tried bargaining with the savages. Reasoning. Pleading. Threatening too. Nothing gets through to them. They understand her, she knows, for she cycled through more than seven known languages, and they responded to at least three, if only to laugh her off. They hear her arguments. They just don't care. They live outside the laws of sovereigns. Savages.

When she notices the clumsy drawing sound in the distance, she opens her eyes to find them dragging Sebastian between a pair, pulling his slumped form into camp only to dump him outside a partial tent some yards from her reach. The sight gets her body wriggling. Testing her bounds. "Bash," she breathes, half relief, half horror, almost as terrified of what it is they plan to do to him as she is of her own fate. And then, swallowing her fright and weakness, struggling upward only to be caught by a thick hand at the chest and shoved back down, she calls louder, stronger, "Bash!" Urging him from unconsciousness. Pulling him awake.

"Mary?" he murmurs muffledly, dragged and confused as he works painstakingly to awareness. Face in the dirt, he presses splayed hands to the ground and rolls himself onto his side, only in time to receive a vicious kick to the sternum by a passing vagrant. Brow furrowed, expression grimaced, he coughs in recoil, pushing rigidly up as he remembers the danger. Seeing her splayed there once his eyes clear, he surges alert and intense instantly, losing the last embers of sluggishness by spikes through his heart. "_Mary_!"

Before he makes it far, a boot hits between his shoulder blades, pitching him back into the dirt facefirst as another snatches his arms behind his back, roping around his wrists as they did to her. He struggles harshly, vehemently, but fighting them off proves impossible from his disadvantage, his vulnerable position and their superior numbers. He is bound and pressed to the ground before he can help her. She can only watch in helpless desolation. Never has she felt so powerless.

"Bash…"

"Mary—"

"Don't make them hurt you, Bash. It will do us no good," she tells him, her voice carrying across the distance stretched wretchedly between them with a lot more strength and steadiness than she would have thought herself capable of at the moment. He meets her frightened eyes for this and must see something there that gives him faith, or makes him obey, because he stills suddenly by her command, reluctantly resigning to submit to his situation. Perhaps he knows the sense in this or simply wishes to put her at ease what little he can. Regardless, all she cares for is that they stop their jeering towards her protector, refocusing on the girl atop their altar, splayed so for sacrifice. She isn't sure this is better, but he was only beckoning punishment. It is futile to fight in such a way so ill placed. If these are to be her last moments, she doesn't want to spend them watching villains make Sebastian bleed. She couldn't bear it.

"_Recipero nostrum vitualamen_," her tormentor recites to something in the air, finally using a language she recognizes, saying nothing she is relieved to hear, "_Dignus fidelitas, valde crudus_." Something about accepting a worthy offering. Something about a great bleeding.

As he does, his blade draws across her flesh once more, digging deeper than before without cutting in enough to make her scream. Her body bows off the rock regardless at the slicing pain, reflexes trying to arch away from the touch bound as she is, but a seeping of dark red blood snakes a path down the center of her, marking a thick rivulet of crimson over alabaster. And as it begins, every man and woman in camp crests into a chanting undersong. Building towards something like a critical mass. Crescendo.

Whatever it is, Sebastian resurges vehemence in his agitation, struggling ferociously against his captors who stand above. "_Infitialis_!" he yells, spitting out with heated quickness, "_Operor non praesumo delictum_."

"Bash," she tries when they dig heels viciously into his spine, grounding him into the dirt below while they laugh, but he rushes madly over her softly saddened quelling.

"Are you all mad? She is _Queen_!" he insists, his teeth gritting, his body still pushing up against his restraints, hurting himself but never giving in. "You lay one hand on her and the entire Court will hunt you down like the vile dogs you are. They won't stop until every last one of you has been drawn and quartered. There will be _nothing_ left. Do you hear me?"

All his railing accomplishes is a dirty fist clenching hard in the dark hair at the nape of his head, ripping him upright onto his knees, arms trapped at his back. A dagger comes around to the line of his exposed throat. Poised to slit this open and spill forth his life across the unconsecrated earth. He tries to take advantage of the shift in position but two more surround him, shoving him down at the shoulders, keeping him harrowed. The edge cuts into skin and Mary throws herself.

"No!" she cries, rage and command strong in her shout. Torn free of the jagged tip, she rolls off the rock to the soil towards him before a hand catches her by the hair and wrenches her short, bending her backward over the altar, arm banding her collarbone from behind, knife coming from above at her heart.

"_She is not for sacrifice_!" he swears, and the heights of his intensity grips her overwhelmingly. Something about his fervent voice, about the passion speaks to her, calls up a thing long buried in a deep depth of the girl. Or perhaps it is merely for the fever pitch feeling of a dagger on descent to pierce through her chest which breaks the barrier inside. Whatever the trigger, a dam is freed, and Mary finds herself blinded by vision, by memory recalled that is foreign to her, of which she is unable to remember for herself as her own. Nearly as if knowing for the first time, she sees a flash of familiar fiery red curls, of a devilish face casting down at her as a young one.

_Never allow them transgress, little queen. When cornered, you strike. Now _…_ fight._

Transposed over the present around her, she sees that fiery creature standing with her under an overcast sky in a sprawling valley, rolling green hills stretching into the distance, a stone home towards the sea that is the convent sanctuary. She sees them standing face to face, opposing off, sees the wildling redhead flip a glinting dagger in her hand, bringing it overhand for attack when she lunges at the braced girl, no more than thirteen. At the same time younger Mary dodges aside, missing her starting strike in the recollection, grown Mary finds herself sliding downward from him and his coming weapon, lurching low across the slab of stone, spine arching taut to do so, to evade his plunge, bringing her bound arms aligned instead, snapping her wrists apart as far as possible to strain the ropes binding her, slicing through them as the blade hits rock where her heart had been. The vision leaves her with a zinging shock as her arms split wide, freed from their bounds, her body curving upward in her partial second of utter freedom.

The nomads shout their aggrievement as rock to metal sparks.

Shocked, she is shaken from her stupor by Bash calling her name, making her fling herself back down against stone to miss an arc at her head, to catch the thick wrist still clutching the dagger on its way to her neck. In a movement fluid of her whole body, she twists aside with the offensive limb as her legs come up to scissor about his shoulders, a calf hooking over one broad shoulder while its match curves his sternum, catching across his back and slamming him facedown against the altar, his fingers losing nerve, unclasping the dagger to let it clank beside them, where she snatches it to her own hold before he bucks her off. She lands a kick to his stomach, knocking him staggering off exactly as he shoves her over the end of the slab, and she flips over her head, lands accidentally in a clumsy crouch on the ground nearby with the dagger haft still tight in her grasp.

"Mary!"

Attention shooting up, she pitches forward into a scramble across the camp towards tied Bash, just missing the lunge of a beefy assailant from behind who had been about to pounce her there. Her first sane instinct is to get to her friend, to cut him loose so he may protect her, but she is soon impeded from her path by oncoming brutes, all but one abandoning their post of subduing him. The momentum of her rush is met by a backhanded slap that sends her spinning with a sharp yelp. And a furious yell from Bash. Coiling onto knees and palms, she tilts her head, black tresses draped to curtain her face, and her tongue darts out to lick blood from the corner of her mouth. She waits, muscles taut enough to tear, until his boots come into sight through her obscuring hair, her fingers curling anticipatorily at the hilt before she lashes out. The blade is driven down through his toes in vicious strength, pinning his foot to the soil, before she surges up and rams her shoulder into him, forcing him flat on his back from the disadvantage. As the others rush in, she bends and yanks free her acquired weapon, whirling then to face the closest with a lightness to her stance.

Something has to have come over the Scottish queen, since she is most decidedly not herself, not anything like herself at all as she ducks low and bends sideways avoiding wild swinging strikes of a madwoman, one after another in a row, her body moving swift and trim of its very own accord, instinct or reflex she hadn't known she possessed controlling her motions, her every reaction now. Pivoting below a higher arc across, she catches an unsturdy ankle and uses power from a shoulder and her bent back snapping upright again to cast the woman over her head, quick thrown aside, clearing the way to parry a dagger to match her own, blades clanging to slide down to hook hilts, where she vices fingers to his adjacent wrist and twirls under, sending him flying forward disarmed by a last low kick to the shin against upper body momentum. With each hand full of weapons now, she flips her hold and comes in on the offensive, striking overhand at the next man to lunge for her from ahead, aiming for his shoulders only to be deflected, forced to veer aside and spin low into a hurried crouch past him, his grasp on a rusty axe two-handed when he swings it swift for her head. Reversing a dagger to try slicing at his Achilles, she is caught at the wrist by another from beside, her arm wrenched from the shoulder, ripping her around to face the leader, her first tormentor. Before he has a chance to press the blade he holds to her throat, she looks down with wide eyes to find her own already sinking deep into his gut. While her brain is freezing up in horror, her body is quick to lift a leg and kick at him, knocking the dying man backward from her way, her dagger still clutched tight in her hand, pulling free of him as he goes. She spins and leaps back at the middle to avoid a swipe of the axe at her stomach. Its next plunge forward, she does not evade, but rather moves into the stroke, sidestepping only inches and catching the wood at a palm so it skates right by her, allowing her to get in close to its wielder, striking him hard in the throat with the edge of her fist to choke before freeing him of the crude weapon and sweeping his feet from under him to spin away for the next.

When a brute with a broadsword comes after her, his strikes a swift flurry of movements at her, she struggles to keep up, to not miss a beat as she dodges and blocks, avoiding his furious attack. One by one, she loses her weapons, daggers being cast aside one direction or another, and is soon backed into an ancient oak with nowhere to go. Thinking fast, or more properly not thinking at all, she presses fingertips to the bark behind her until it bites and sucks in a bracing breath before she pivots forward, dropping as she goes to slide between his spread legs and come up the other side just as the sword meets oak harsh enough to have cleaved her head clear off.

Sebastian must have been blunted into unconsciousness for a moment or so again, because he is fumbling groggily from his face planted in the ground again as he calls out for her in warning, "Mary! Watch the woods. To your east!" The savage lingering near to keep him down kicks him once more into the soil, a boot to his shoulder blades, and he bucks him off, dislodged but not so unbalanced as to be taken by a prone weaponless man with arms bound behind his back.

Scrambling in dirt, she snatches back one lost dagger and makes a mad dash for the protection of the altar when an arrow whizzes past her shoulder. After a moment of listening to the scuffling beyond her, she peeks over the edge of the bedrock she hunches behind to get herself a glimpse of an archer emerging from the trees, arrow nocked to his bow as he waits her out. The swordsman hasn't that kind of patience, apparently, because he jerks his weapon loose of the oak it stuck into and trundles toward her hiding place. She hunkers lower to the stone, curling into a tighter ball, waiting with bated breath for assault. Clutching her bloodied dagger to her chest. Whatever outer alteration which had possessed her seems to have gone, leaving her stunned and scared to death, at odds with what to do, what _can_ be done. Except rather than bluster round the corner of stone and drag her out into the open by her hair, slit her throat open, her hunter pauses in his pursuit, boots slowing then stilling a few paces away, veering his course after a moment of consideration. She shudders free an uneven breath as she gains distance, unformed relief turning to dark dread as she catches fingertips to the rock edge and sees where he is headed.

"Come out now, my lady." His voice is gravel taunting but fluent French. "Enough games."

_Bash_, she thinks, sinking to the soil, back against stone, stomach sickening, knowing full well his intentions to use the bastard prince against her. She shuts her eyes tight and breathes in deep through parted lips. They will slit his throat. They will make him suffer. _Move_, her brain demands, with all the fervid intensity familiar to his equinox nature, _Do something_.

Fingers shifting grip on the dagger, her tongue drags over her bottom lip, catching it between her teeth and pressing for pain, collecting herself, her nerves coiling into action. The radiant sun shines through the trees. The breeze rustling her hair is cool and whispering secrets on its wings. Do something. Yes. She must. Do something. Twisting the hilt, she springs up with a turn of torso, arm bent back before hurling forward as she reaches above the edge, propelling the blade toward the French speaker before dropping low again behind her shield, not a powerful enough throw to do any real damage, but enough to divert attentions. And that is all she needs. All she can ask for. Lord, she hopes this works, hopes she hasn't just thrown away her only weapon for simply nothing. At the commotion of dodging the toss, distracting gazes, if only for a second, she thrusts out from behind the altar, rushing low through the distance, racing up the incline into the nearby treeline, where the archer finds haven.

Shouts echo through the camp from different directions as they spot her. By the time he reacts to her dash, it is too late, and she catches the outward curve of the bow when he swings it her way, hurrying to adjust his aim. Rough carving of wood hits palm and her fingers furl, trapping arrow to its string, pushing it away from her as she steps in near, whirling backward to slam her other elbow into his temple, knocking his head into the tree he found shielding from. As he collapses, she turns full circle, following through the first two steps of movement to finish off by swinging around with the bow and arrow placed properly to her shoulder, string stretched taut when she faces the pair, letting loose the tension to set the arrow flying without hesitation, almost before she stops turning all the way around. It drives itself into the throat of the swordsman, blood spurting out from there, his hand going so limp, losing grip of the broadsword he had raised to cut into kneeled Sebastian. Pretty features cool of expression, cold with regality and a hardness uncharacteristic of the girl but not the queen in her, she watches him drop slowly to his own knees beside the bastard prince and fall forward onto his front. Dead.

The throat may be one of the smallest targets to aim for on the human body, but it is the most unprotected of all spots also, is the easiest to penetrate. Which means it takes less brute strength. Which is why she always aims for the throat … _wait_. No. That isn't right. She has never done harm to another living being in her life. Certainly she has never killed. Never aimed an arrow at a man's vulnerable throat and let it loose.

_Always aim for the throat_, a mocking huskily feminine voice tells her from somewhere inside of her mind, from far away, a long time ago. _It is the softest place, little queen. You are not so strong. You need every advantage you can get. So you must know more, know the right way, if you expect to survive in this world._ She feels the ghost of gentle but strong hands alighting on spots of skin on her body, lightly touching her raised elbow, shifting her unformed hip, adjusting her wide stance, showing her exactly how to stand, how to aim, how to fire. Teaching her to fight. To be so fast and fearless and most of all fierce. She senses spectral memory, of standing just as this, holding a bow and arrow such like this one, practicing her technique, her skill, working over and over until it is all so much muscle memory and automaton. Lessens were grueling. Were encompassing.

Why could she not remember before? Why may she only grasp faint wisps of memory now?

Acting immediately, unlike her who has frozen in the stasis of cold unfeeling ruthlessness here, Bash rolls the distance as soon as the swordsman hits the ground, coming onto his side lying prone, using bound hands behind his back to steal the small dagger holstered to the belt at his hip there, to flip it upside and slash off the ropes, freeing his arms at last. Narrowly in time to defend himself from his constant guard, who shakes from his stunned stupor of staring at the body of his comrade to come after him, but the rogue fells him easily now he is unbound.

"Mary?" he calls tentatively, shifting focus solely back to her once he has handled the last man, speaking softly below his breath, very cautious to not startle her, and eases closer, stepping across remains at his feet after taking a moment to regain his breath, wiping his cheek free of splattered streaks in blood, his brow of matted brown hair. Those eerie blue eyes zero in on her and burn in, as if worried for her health, worried what she will do now. Understandably so, she realizes then, once she notices she still stands aiming an empty bow his direction. Dazed.

Forcing herself to swallow, to wet her dried lips and speak, she tells him, "You were right."

Confusion furrows his brow as he nears her on the incline. "Pardon?"

Breathing carefully, precisely, voice held void of expression, she explains, "I should never have come into these woods. You were right."

Relief and comprehending makes the tension of his face melt and his lips quirk in a half smile. A wry grin really. "All is well now, Your Grace. You can give me the bow if you like."

Glancing down at where her trembling hands still grip the arrowless bow tight enough to rive, Mary gathers her wits with a blink. Forcibly, she relaxes her hold, letting go when he gently takes the weapon from her, still watching her with that cautious look about him that makes her feel like cracked glass ready to shatter. She doesn't want him looking at her like that, however appropriate, because it makes her more likely to fracture. She wants him looking at her like he normally does. With admiration and devotion, even when it makes her feel uncomfortable, makes her frightened, because that look empowers her, his presence makes her feel strong and capable as she should be. Not this now. This wariness.

Though she opens her mouth to speak, to assuage his concerns and normalize their dynamic despite the extraordinary circumstances around them, she never gets the chance. Pain sears into her arm, force of the arrow that grazes her bicep spinning her around, and his broader taller form hits her from behind, taking her to the ground beneath his powerful body. Her hand has slipped to his wrist behind her before she realizes she is moving, commandeering the knife he still clutches, pushing upright from the ground beside him, not quite out from under him, eye finding the enemy in an instant as the enraged nomadic woman steps into camp from the other side, stepping around her fallen brethren to get closer as she nocks another arrow meant for the queen.

By more abrupt harshness she ever believed herself capable, more speed and strength she ever remembers possessing, Mary snaps her arm out and releases, pitching the blade into a rapid spiral. It takes the second archer in the stomach, making her stagger back with a gasp, dropping her bow. As she collapses, blood frothing from her mouth down her chin, Mary shuts her eyes in pained tire, falling back to the earth below her with a weary heave of breath, her body brushing indecently to his as he still sprawls beside her, half atop the girl, their legs tangled loosely. They just breathe for awhile there, side by side, lying together amidst the trees, not far off the camp littered of death. Reeling. Recovering. By the time her head turns towards him, ready to face the aftermath of mess, she is almost relaxed, her lashes lowered, her breaths shallow again, but the sight he greets her by makes her hooded gaze go wide in alarm and shock.

"Bash!" she exclaims, snapping upward, startled into panic. At her concern, he glances down in direction of her attention, shrugging one shoulder up as he does to reach a better look at the issue in question. Which happens to be an arrow jammed straight through his hunting arm, sticking out the other side, a most alarming protrusion, even if it is a lesser vital area.

Disconcertingly unbothered, he sighs and drops his head back to the soil, saying lightly to her, "It is no wonder my shoulder feels afire."

"Are you—"

Opening his eyes at the wavering distress of her, he pins her with them, with those blue eyes, breathtakingly intense once more, breathtakingly assuring. "I'm fine, Mary."

"You can't ride with that thing in your arm," she tells him, beginning to think practically again. The implication is clear, she feels, but he appears only partially aware.

Catching her hand softly within his own when she reaches for him, he brings her loose fingers to his lips in an absent kiss, a sincere lapse, perhaps taken leave of his senses in the jarring gesture, for he has become pale and clammy from blood loss, from the multiple head wounds likely as well. His voice is slightly slurred and too soft as he speaks. "May I ask Your Grace a great favor?"

"Anything." It is a promise she should not declare, but it leaves her immediately, escaping too emotionally earnest with her raw voice. Modulating better, she adds, "You saved my life."

He laughs at this, a tired dragging chuckle, head dropping back again as if too weighty to rise. "You saved your own life. You saved mine." And then, as if only to himself in a reverent undertone, "My queen is amazing."

Startled by the unguarded unadulterated worship in his oblivious cadence, she slips her hand free of his grasp, clears her throat to shake her nerves away, shake the distractions from her mind. "This will hurt," she says, but gives him no time to stir, to prepare, before she is snapping the tip off his arrow and tugging the slender shaft from his arm, from clinging meat and muscle and skin with a gush of bright red blood that spills over her deft hands. This gets him back to full consciousness, sure enough, and he comes surging upward from the ground with eyes popping wide and a harsh vehement curse which should not be uttered in her royal fairer sex presence. With a slight upturn of one corner of her lush lips, she ignores this, ripping a strip of material from her ruined shift and tying the wound off. Words graver than her expression reveals, than her neutral measure suggests, she mentions at a murmur, "This will be the second scar you carry because of me."

The implied guilt and its burden draws his focus back to the girl. To the queen. Clears his fog. "Marks I carry with pride," he confides, he promises, catching her hand once more where it lingers at his tended injury, squeezing lightly, politely not acknowledging the slight tremor of its balance, "obtained in service to my queen."

"I'm not your queen."

"You will be."

She says nothing to this, but their gazes meet when she looks up from under her black lashes, meet and hold, sharing everything their words cannot possibly. When she does reclaim her voice, all she says is, "We must leave this place. Before more come upon us."

"Are you well to ride?" he questions, concern in the creases of his face as she rises.

Arching a fine eyebrow, she retorts, "Are you?"

"Fair enough," he concedes, a humorous smirk curving his mouth, lighting his clear blue eyes until she bends and takes hold of him, hauling him not unkindly to his feet beneath her support, making his face tense with pain he refuses to make known by noise.

While they ease together out of camp, finding their horses hitched beside the rest they have, collections of wildlings and stolen property, leaving behind the unseemly carnage of the nomads, Mary summons the courage to voice the thoughts plaguing her concern. "Sebastian, I must ask of you something more."

"Anything," he says, meaningfully echoing her sentiment.

Looking ahead, although she feels his eyes fixed on her from aside as tangibly as his arm that hooks around her shoulders, she inhales a breath and declares, "Do not speak of this in the castle." They mustn't speak of it. Word of her folly could bring grave consequences.

Grim to disappoint her, he dissents, "That will be impossible."

"I will handle the tale," she persists, going queenly in countenance, "I will see to its coherence. Just give me your word." And then, after a moment of his silence, of his stiffened discomfort there, she relents into honest emotion, imploring softly, "Please, Sebastian."

He takes another moment of charged silence to decide as they amble. Torn between his belief of her best interest and his desire to appease her needs. Then he says, "It will be our secret."

A promise she may put faith in.

She may _always_ put faith in his promises. Unlike his brother…

The only horse retained from their stable is her black stallion. Not wanting to take the others, not wanting to separate anyway, she stays close to his back as he catches a foot in the stirrup and swings himself astride the saddle, hovering in case his dizziness should overwhelm again and she must catch him best she is capable. Once he is seated, appearing to be manageable in his welfare, for however long that lasts, he offers her his uninjured arm and she clasps his hand, lets him help her up into the saddle with a tug. Fitted to his back. The trek getting out of the woods is arduous. Finding the king's road is a chore. But once they are on path, free of the forest finally, on their way back to the comfort of the castle, each are privately immensely relieved. The steady trot they must take the horse into to hurry their progress pains them both, him for his wound and his concussion, her for the bruises sustained flowering her ribcage, a stinging ache she is keeping finely to herself. It almost comes as much a relief as it was to leave the trees when Château d'Amboise ushers itself into sight ahead.

Breathing heavily once they are finished, each dismounting with effort, he swipes bleeding smears from his brow and asks rather breathlessly, rather laughingly, "Who in heaven taught you to do battle that way?" As if the thought only just occurred to him. As if he hasn't been stewing on what he observed the whole way along.

Taking his arm as they turn, Mary allows herself a heavy sigh, flowing with her emphatic words, "I have no earthly idea."

* * *

My Songs:  
Mash Rescue: _Holding onto Heaven_ by Nickelback


	7. Here by the Lake

.

**Here By The Lake**

_"If we should sit side to side like so, Here by the lake, In light or rain, Just day by day, I would never be more allayed."_

: : :

The Blood Wood. That is what they call it. That is what they call the forest which surrounds Amboise on the river Loire. Which borders the royal residence. That is how the French know it. Good Lord, does she wish someone had seen to tell her that early on. That the bastard prince had explained just why it was unwise to venture inside when he first warned her off. She supposes it is because such things are superstitious to speak of. She also supposes she is the last to hear because such things are not told to young girls who are also royals.

The female species of nobility is one to be sheltered from those such grisly facts of this world, sheltered also from the weighty responsibilities to which were born to them, responsibilities such as having any real say in the great power they possess or how it is wielded, wielded by kings and their male heirs, by powerful political uncles and distant regent mothers, somehow exempt from the limitations of being feminine in this world of kings and their pawns. Marie of Guise is a Frenchwoman, and her mother, but she is a warrior to which all respect. Never looked down upon or dismissed for her weaker sex. Queen Catherine too wields the power married to her without restriction from her betters, such as they are, anyone high in noble blood without the misfortune of being born a woman. It is only Mary who seems unable to master the craft of maneuvering past those hindrances. Mary, Queen of Scots, a most powerless player in the game of thrones.

And she is becoming _sick_ of it.

Saved from the embarrassment and certain complications of having to admit she had run away with no guard and no lady, story goes she was attacked in her bed twice now, and after defending her person against an English assassin who ended dead below her balcony, she took to concealing herself in the secret passageways of the castle connected to her chambers, waiting out any likely reinforcements he might have retained. Since no one dare openly question the word of a queen, her tale was accepted without doubt. At least none expressed. She is sure the king realizes there is more to it than that. And if not, his wife certainly knows better, but she will not pursue the matter. It looks badly enough upon Court that such inexcusable negligence should persist to be problem, with the young royal being in their charge, being theirs to protect. She would rather they believe her a cowering coward, huddled in the dark and lost among the interior tunnels, too afraid to find her way out for a night and a day, better than know the truth. That her very first instinct was to flee all parties involved. Such revelation would be too much of a weakness to surrender.

No one asks after where Sebastian was during this time.

There is a sunny fair snowfall festival going on about the grounds of Château d'Amboise today, and Mary keeps distance from the cheerful revelry as politely permitted without feeling banished, not near suited for celebration. Her ladies surround her in the meadow by the pond, seated with a picnic spread, her dress a pretty white creation and her raven tresses loosed around her shoulders, adorned by a delicate crown woven of white wildflowers. Staying as far from those forsaken woods as humanly able. Trying all her might at not think over the troubling developments of recent days. She doesn't think about death or duty, of the crippling fear she felt and still feels echoing inside, of blood on her hands or fragmented memories that don't belong. She eats tart strawberries with fresh cream under a golden sun, enjoying the beauty of even a wintry French countryside, air laced with a bit of bite but waning against the warmth of daylight. She does not _think_.

In the distance, a string of brass horns trumpet a call, beckoning goers down the rolling hill to commence the afternoon entertainments, and as her ladies leave her, she finds herself on verge of contemplating things better left unacknowledged. So many things. Fortunately, she isn't left alone to her sole devices for long. Sebastian of all people comes strolling along and sits down beside her with an impish grin, his wineskin all but emptied, his eyes alight like sparkling ice in the brightness. Of course he is the one to find her, to come for her, as he always is these days, with her Francis off acquainting himself to more _enjoyable_ company. Certainly less interesting, if she does say herself, but also without the inherent complications of royalty.

"Keeping from trouble today, Your Grace?"

A black eyebrow goes archly up at this jest. "You say that as if I go looking for it."

"Don't you?" he counters in lightheartedness, watching her with those eerie intent eyes when he upends his wineskin to drain the last drops from its belly. The look about him carries humor but also a challenging insinuation that gets unerringly under her skin, makes her feel almost at odds from within, makes her shift where she sits in the grass, because there he goes being cheeky again. Being horribly unfairly irresistible.

Mary resists the bothersome pull of red lips, mouth trying to curve of its own accord for him, whether she wishes it or not. Rather she purses them through it, her head canting aside in whimsy restrained by subtleness, her eyes narrowing in hollow quarrel. Unfortunately, her delight is clear, is inappropriately abundantly unmistakable in his presence. Even so, her intonation is controlled, airily regal but with a touch of playful when she says, "You belittle me, dear Sebastian."

"Oh, not that then, my queen!" His husky earnest laughter for her insincere reproach spreads dangerously pleasing warmth through the girl. "Never that…"

Bound by the limitless restrictions of her royal existence, Mary must ignore the way his laugh dies down, fading gently as weightless joviality is overcome by heavier sentiments, infatuation of a profound sort which shines unmasked from those striking eyes, from his only just rugged features. A softer version of the look he gave her after their misadventure in the woods. That one of awe or astoundment once the shock wore off, at how she fought their enemy so admirably, so shockingly, her skill and speed and grace leaving him stunned and bewildered. _Who in heaven taught you to do battle that way?_ After the wariness of her change and for her wellbeing receded, he was struck. And he did not hide the feeling from his face.

Much to her unnerving discomforts.

Still seemingly ever irreverent in nature, but he moves onto serious matters, mentioning idly, "It appears word of these recent concerns has reached your mother in Scotland."

"Has it?"

"She sent another uncle to give hell to the king."

"Yes, I imagine she would."

Brow furrowing curiously, he accepts the wineglass she offers without note, fingers brushing as he takes it from her, and wonders aloud, "Just how many are there?"

"Uncles of mine?" she asks, answering agreeably without pause, "An endless parade." It is true. Although the Scottish Stuarts may be a dying breed, her maternal relations, House of Guise, are as strong and expansive as ever were. If her mother has sent another brother, something of change is on the horizon, however subtle. She wonders with fatigue what it will be.

They sit by the water in the warming sun amidst richening dying flowers of the vast meadow in comfortable silence, swinging naturally back into conversation when occasion arises, falling quiet once more afterwards, enjoying the peace and easiness of the afternoon together with festivities of the kingdom reveling in the near distance. This is such an innocent dangerous thing she mustn't permit herself. And yet she does. When talk comes around to his little brother, as it inevitably will, she shares her misgivings over his straying attentions that call into doubt his sincerity toward her, and her companion is quick if tentative at masterfully assuaging disquiet on the intricate matter, smoothly transitioning her mood from frustrated grimness into smiling laughter with his charming incorrigible humor needling under her skin.

Without thinking, on the tail of another laugh, she reveals, "I wish you wouldn't do that."

He takes another offhanded sip of his ale in between. "Do what?"

"Make me happy," she confesses softly, surprisingly, almost as if solely for herself, gazing out regretfully upon a sparkling pond, adding even quieter the next moment, "And sad all at once."

Sebastian stops, struck from his distraction by the undistorted truth, his wineglass lowering in dazed absentness, his crystalline eyes staring unguardedly after the girl. The queen. The betrothed to his legitimate little brother. The most beautiful creature he has ever laid his gaze upon.

She never looks across for him again.

* * *

My Songs:  
Mash Solemn Secret: _Still Here_ by Digital Daggers


	8. We Were Not Yet Lost

.

**We Were Not Yet Lost  
**

_"We were not yet lost, For our stumbled footing came later, Upon a shadowed turn foreseen by our peers."_

: : :

Lady Adelaide and Nostradamus discuss Queen Mary of Scotland most indiscreetly while each are locked within his private apothecary chambers. On the whole, it is not such a rare occurrence, not of the two duplicitous agents with much in common, despite their so differing agendas and his persistent aversion of her offensively irreverent presence. Since she promptly disappeared without trace from the château during the young queen's notable absence, and only today emerged again, awaiting his entrance in the apothecary, propped inappropriately atop his worktable, legs crossed in taunt and body leant backwards with her palms planted to the wood behind her along attitude, she is just now continuing their previous interchange.

"I have seen the current course of my monarch in the stars and it does not please me," she says, as of no prerequisite, leaning over his broad shoulder where he sits at work grounding remedies in his mortar to pluck a small dish of molten caramel from where she left it aside.

"Many things displease me," he mentions not idly, glancing meaningfully at where she sits still, perched like some unabashed courtesan atop his workspace, invading his privacy, her skirts hiking indecently by slivering up her calf. The sight is most discomfiting.

Adelaide toys with the dark gold sauce, stirring a dainty fingertip through its swirled surface, some wicked little smile playing at the edges of her lips. "That is where you and I differ, darling."

"Yes." His tone is dripping with dry disdain. "You always have placed the utmost importance on what pleasure you may derive from your surroundings."

To which the redhead mockingly chides, "No need to affect such a resentful cadence, Damus." Lifting a finger, whorls of warm caramel twining its length, she lets it drip into his mortar to agitate the tightly wound man before bringing it to her mouth, marring her lips sticky with the substance. "As I recall, you quite appreciated that trait of mine the first we met."

"That was a long time ago," he argues, pointedly not letting his gaze stray to the supple part of her structure that she so shamelessly draws attention toward, "I was young."

Catching her messy lower lip with her teeth past a bright teasing smile, green eyes gleaming, she accentuates, "Very young."

"My foolishness knew near to no bounds."

And with a pretty pout at this, Adelaide declares, "That is what I liked about you."

Turning pointedly at her, impatiently, he gives a hard look. "What is it you are after, witch?"

"I told you," she says, all but drawling patronizingly, "I want a reading." She swipes a thumb to her lips and clears them, sucking the remnants off into her mouth with a slow stroke of her tongue before she addresses him lastly, her mood half bored but breezy. "I am unsure of some things and would like an outside conference."

"Go away, Adelaide." Tone flat and face the same, he dismisses her presence, shifting back for his task at hand. "I don't have time for your games."

Arch brow high, smile sharp, she counters, "What if I was to warn you of a certain disaster laid on the horizon very near, an incident of the most crass violence that had very much to do with you, and that unpleasant Medici daughter whose boots you do so enjoy licking? Would that motivate my prickly seer into aiding me?"

This stills his working hands. Eyes downturned to the table still, he queries, "Disaster?"

Knowing she has him, Adelaide sits back with a flash of victory. "Indeed."

: : :

Mary hits. And when she hits, she hits _hard_. The young queen is fired quicksilver as she moves, dancing in defined precise motions of planned violence, of play battle, practicing her technique in equal measures of uneasy reluctance and breathless exhilaration, of secret hesitant wanting and a thrilled burgeoning playfulness. The further she goes forward, however against the idea proposed she was to begin with, all the more she falls prey to its appeal, gaining bite and brilliance within it. She is truly magnificent.

This is what he thinks as Sebastian lands in the mud on his back. The first time. By the second, he is slightly fired himself, driven to pursue, to strain harder, faster, smarter, eager to match her. No easy feat, he might admit, actually becoming winded through the sparring, becoming pressed to keep up. See, he came upon her in midst of recklessness from sake of boredom, straying alone to the meadow bordering the east woods, where she often goes to be among the rolling hills and the trees and out of sight with her beloved animal Stirling. She perched precariously at a branch of a dangerously towering redwood, hanging high above him when he wandered beneath her place, craning his neck upward to the unruly girl after she called for him, her smile blinding and her loose laughter so beautifully breathy. He was shocked, and incorrigibly charmed, and his grin promptly dropped with a spike of aggravated panic when she hopped off her perch to fall some five feet in casualness that scares him, catching herself at the next she planned, her skirts a billowing mess as she twirled and shimmied, absently but gracefully descending like some spritely savage wildling of her homeward highlands. The girl is full of surprises. Every new day, it seems, she greets him with another to unsettle his nerves. Once she alighted the ground, he proceeded to admonish her risk, to which she countered reasonably she was driven to danger by the utter dullness of the day so far, and he sought to remedy a safe solution. Thus they find themselves sequestered by the west pond, at the edge of the treeline, stealing privacy for a diverting activity to which might not put to risk her unbroken neck. So they spare one cloudy winter afternoon in the meadow.

And he is regretting the decision nearly as much as he exults in it.

"Come now, Bash." Cocking her head, Mary smiles down at him with an irresistible confidence, lighthearted and electric. His responding grin is breathless and bright in rich roguish enjoyment. "You can do better than that."

He is on his feet next. Paced apart from her own guarded stance, he circles at wide distance to measure her intentions, each sharing that same eager unexpected pleasure in their small smiles. She takes daggers to him to defend from his broadsword, a wood stock of course to accommodate a queen for his partner, flipping her hold on their hilts back and reverse, slicing and arcing quick in flashing strikes, dodging by sidestep and arch and duck and spin to avoid the onslaught of his own, easily too nimble like lightning to be caught by the superior strength and power behind his swings. When he does manage to meet her, she junctures his sword between her petite blades and shoves, parrying him off in other directions, vaulting arms above and spinning beneath to get at his back. The way her cheeks flush, her hazel eyes alight with gleam, her red lips parted for panting breaths, lush and tempting as they are, especially curved in such an innocently wicked way as are just now. The way her skirts swirl around her as she turns, her long black tresses whipping with them as well, making her look wild and breathtaking. It is more than enough to divert his focus. But he stays on his task, careful in every strike, every block in defense, every movement he and she alike makes to ensure things don't go wrong. Not that it appears necessary. The queen proves more than adept at handling herself. They push and pull, pressing forward and falling back to gain space, ebbing and flowing in natural order, driving one another across the grass, a violent but gentle ageless dance. There are no recorded steps, no structured play by play, but they adapt to each other and pick up the moves on instinct almost immediately.

"Watch yourself, my lady. Almost broke skin," he quips with that crooked cocksure grin of his. It serves its purpose, making her smile thicken, become richer more personal, humor lighting her, and laughter chimes in her wake when she turns, drawing from range of his offhanded downswing. He doesn't specify whose skin he is referring to. It could be either with the evenly matched pace at their steps. She doesn't mind. "You're getting vicious."

"Forgive me," she says on a breathless wind, nothing contrite about her mouth, or her eyes that glint with delighted fervor, stepping aside his next strike and laying counterattack. She advances, making him give ground, making him bend low to evade a high arcing slice of one shining dagger, leap back at the middle avoiding the other, his sword coming up to parry a third, no time left then to address the last.

With a pained hiss, he jerks from the slip, rushing to heft his wooden broadsword up into place in time to bar the follow through. No hesitation, no pause, she hooks her blades crisscross for his, sliding upward toward its tip, spinning a full rotation as she does, sending his armed stance aside, planting a firm kick low to his stomach as the turn circles around, cementing a swift disarmament while he is knocked backward to the dewy grass for a third occasion this day. When she is sparring, she _spars_. Such is very near to fighting his father. Only without the inevitably childish frustrations. Unlike battling King Henry, Mary makes him smile, makes him ache with satisfaction.

"Oh, my!" she exclaims, like she had the first time, her natural characteristics coming forefront to remind her of who she is and the deceptive delicacy of her countenance. Dropping one dagger to the mud, she covers her mouth with long frozen fingers as worry creases her brow about him, worry and remorse. "Are you all right?"

"Fine," he assures, although his corresponding chuckle is as rueful as the shaking of his head as he pushes sorely up and brushes himself off. "I always need a good kicking every morrow or so. If it happens to be given by a beautiful woman, all the better."

Sheepish now, her mien swaying indecisively between the wild confidence of the warrior there and the tentative ladylike insecurity of her normal behavior, Mary bites her lip and shifts her feet. "I suppose I was carried away."

"I suppose so," he echoes, distantly, dreamily, his crystalline eyes staring into hers from below a fringe of unkempt brown hair. He is entranced. He wishes it weren't so. "Would you like to go another round? Or have you lost your taste?"

Her fingers lax then clench again around the hilt of her remaining dagger, independent of her face and its doubtful expression, and his gaze drawn there draws her own down her body toward it until she glances back up and offers a bright fleeting smile, half embarrassed and half instigating. "Being a lady of honor, I should most assuredly allow you chance to redeem yourself."

Archly now, amused as hell, he challenges, "Redeem _myself_, aye? What makes you think I have not simply bowed to my inferior existence to yield your victory?"

"Have you?"

He hesitates, his expression dead serious in its challenging all of a moment before it gives way, melting into softer teasing admission, his voice going low and huskier than usual when he tells her, "No, Your Grace. I'm ashamed I have not."

Her matching smile thrills him deep inside somewhere irrational and petty for no good reason. She steps back to a starting distance, bending to take hold of discarded hilt and slide it free of soil. "On behalf of your honor as a virile male, I feel I must concede I had not given a fair interchange. When I lose my head, I apparently use my body for all sorts of inappropriate actions," she declares, not realizing how that sounds until a second too late, when his eerie eyes pop wide and the curve of his lips deepens into something unconsciously sensual in its amusement. Though she flushes red as scarlet and freezes in sudden indignity, Mary manages to clear her throat and unlock her limbs, moving past the awkward danger without note, ignoring any arisen implications. "We must begin again and be proper about it now."

"Must we?" he teases, sounding playfully grieved by this assertion, but takes up his sword once more and readies himself for a new bout.

Tentative even still, she is the first again to commence, going offensive and striking forward. He fends off the first flurry, parrying her daggers aside, blocking her advances when she spins in from the castoffs for another, a forceful dance of vehemence. When he catches her wrist once, uses the grip to yank her inward, she twists around below it until her back collides with his chest as her second short blade comes up to the collarbone, hitting the blunt edge of his sword, keeping it from her throat in a threatening pin. Arms pretzeled together, holding her fast against him from behind with their weapons crossed, Bash tries to tighten his vice, force her to disarm. But instead of obliging, she lets the first blade drop to the mud, flipping her trapped wrist to reverse his grip, fingers grasping his forearm, pulling his left side forward into her as she shoves off with the other, knocking his sword out wide even as her heel lifts back to kick at his shin, her shoulders throwing forward low as her hips thrust backward into his own, bumping him off his balance. He falls back, staggering from his grasp on her, and she spins to face off, her dropped dagger already reclaimed, an arrogantly playful curve to her red lips that leaves him unbearably attracted.

"You know you are better with your hands," he mentions, avoiding a crescent arc.

Mary snaps low under his swinging sword to a crouch then spins upward away. "Apparently," she answers, her head tipping to a shoulder as it lifts, unsure of herself here. It is instinct driving her body through every movement and reaction, not her brain, so she is acclimating to what she knows and what she does not with their spar. Finding her footing with this new revelation of itself. This ever increasingly undeniable fact that which implies she has at one point in her life been fairly impressively trained in the form of arts she had no knowledge she possessed skill with a moon ago. So many unanswered questions. No one to ask. No one to trust.

Except for Sebastian. He was there. He saw her. And now he has not a word to say on the issue. He will tell no one. He will keep her secret. He won't pressure her into speaking of such things that she is not yet ready to truly address. She likes that trait about him, a certain enigmatic quality which allows him to put to rest disturbances any other would force on, set them aside with charm until such a time the matter arises naturally. It is a comforting assurance.

Comforting … and dangerous. For she can be herself with him. And she shouldn't be.

Forced from her fluidity of skill and spirit to fight dirty, he resorts to lower tactics than he ever thought ought to as they tangle weapons, coming in close, face to face, and trips her ankles from underneath her, his foot hooking from behind, so they go down together with a gasp and a grunt. He falls on top of her with an impact that steals her breath, a cringe grimacing her beautiful face, air knocked roughly from her lungs as her back hits the hard ground and his body hits atop hers. After a shared wince, hazel on green eyes meet and they begin to laugh, breathlessly winded and a little exhilarated by their play, sharing a moment of stunned pleasure, reveling in the gloriously simple goodness of the afternoon, until their heads turn to find Francis come upon them, his face tense and suspicious as he descends the hill toward their impromptu haven by the pond and trees. Drawing a rushed return to proper composure, they break awkwardly apart then, as if having done something wrong. As if being caught at something forbidden. And in a way, they have been. It will never be permitted, such uncivilized behavior, such impropriety between royal and bastard heir, such unladylike roughshod, such utter recklessness with her wellbeing. Even to be alone in passing with a gentleman without her ladies on standby should be seen as scandalizing from the outside of French court. But this is Francis, who knows what she is like, how she is wild and often free spirited, knows his brother would never risk her reputation or her health. But this is Francis too, her beloved betrothed of a dauphin, and his eye has grown increasingly wary of her as days go by, realizing just this recently that she might be more of an unknown variable than first assumed. As his big brother pushes up from her, from the grass, slipping away from the girl, hurrying without appearing so to his feet with a straight spine and an uncharacteristic stiffness about himself, his fairer counterpart slows to a crawl of approach, hands behind his back. His expression remains exceedingly guarded. This is what causes feelings of shame, of having been caught at some sin, some grave transgress, before the young queen firms her nerve and shakes it off, knowing otherwise, unwilling to feel so. Tipping her head, she lays flat for a second, breathes in deeply, bracingly, and then climbs upright to greet her troubled fiancé.

"What in the world are you lot getting up to?"

The look of repressed panic in her eyes as Sebastian is watching her from the corner of his gets him stepping in with a smoothly dismissive surety, preempting the lackluster scramble of diversion that readies to spill from her parted lips. "Blame me, little brother. I thought Mary ought to have a better ability of defending herself, should the need ever arise again, pray not. But perhaps I should have spoken with you first."

Francis is cold when he agrees, "Perhaps you should have."

Which gets the girl's back up. Icy herself, she arches a brow and counters in edged warning, "Perhaps I make my own decisions."

The dauphin starts to say more, his brother bowing his head in respect to the severe reminder, stopping when she tilts her head, a silencing archness about her now. Things between the two of them have been strained for awhile, much to her regret and gentle grief, but that is partly to do with his habit of straying faith, his Frenchman appetite and his kingly attitude, to which she owes no apology, no deference. They are still finding their footing with one another, still familiarizing to the other as who they have become during their time separated, discovering limits and traits, learning where to push and where to proceed with care, where to push back. This topic is one of her strong points, one of those few things she will not roll over for, needing ever to keep mindful and keep _him_ mindful of who she is, of _what_ she is. That she is no subservient lady. She is a queen. Without a word, she leaves them gracefully to each other, believing this the best way to get such a point across now that it has arisen, her slender shoulders squared high, her hands clasped properly before her muddied gown, her chin tipped up and her expression regal. Statuesque and by grace. Feeling their eyes on her as she goes, she ignores the need to look back.

Pretends to not know what that need means for her future.

: : :

Sebastian was correct in his wit. Her uncle has come with an express design for something to be done about this gross negligence, something to be done to secure her safety, a design meant to protect his royal niece and ferret out the underlying core of parties plotting against her here. He means to do so by demanding certain accommodations be made within her alliance to France. And of course, all throughout this implementation, never does one occur to discuss such with _her_. No, instead the men gather in secret behind closed doors, using misdirection from the guards and the servants and the lingering nosy nobles wandering without cause through Court.

Mary is aware of the undercurrents only because she has her _own_ network of spies keeping eye on situations all which relate to her standing. Because she is of the mind such a practice will prove inevitably invaluable as time comes, and so she sought solutions and moved pieces on a board for a game of chess her own, to determine her own outcome as best she could, aside the king's game and his queen's and the outside forces threatening her reign. Though she does not trust her uncle to be explicitly forthright with her on such matters, even involving her person, she has secured a party within the room of negotiations whom she does, to which she waits all but impatiently for determinate word from. Adapting well to the world of royal courts, she will never be comfortable existing at the whim of a manipulative mentality in this political espionage, no matter how adept she becomes at tempering the game to her favor while all believe her oblivious.

It is a dangerous game. To be sure. And a wearying one.

This is the reason she finds herself growing more and more dependent on her stolen moments in the presence of the bastard prince. As her ladies are her friends, each are divided to themselves, contending to their own trivial pursuits, and none can earnestly empathize with the gravest straits she has been put to since coming to the castle, or truly grasp those vivid realities which come from living with your head beneath an ever present gallows. Sebastian does not speak of serious things, not those things, but she feels the awareness of it all between them still, acceptance and empathy. As if when she wanted to express them, she could, she could freely do so, and that is comforting to just know as much. But she has no need to express them in his presence. What is bubbling up from her throat and constricting her chest with stifling it whenever close company surrounds is peaceful when she spends those rare occasions beside Bash. So she suspects she needs him.

As much as that thought provokes her to resistance. To fear.

How lonely this place would be without his presence.

If she were to be without him…

No. Those are thoughts she mustn't contemplate.

The workout was extremely beneficial to her health. She is a bundle of nerves lately, of tightly bound anxieties, pacing and churning indoors, resisting the near constant urge to claw at the walls and beat at the windows, feeling the stone of the castle closing in on her every second that passes, every polite insincerity exchanged, her eyes distrusting every face she encounters. Sparring with Sebastian allowed a surprisingly paroxysmal release for all that restless energy. The fact that it has resulted in complicating tensions is almost inconsequential.

Almost but not quite.

Fingertips ghosting her lips as they tingle, her pace falters, stilling in the middle of the corridor as she loses herself in her thoughts. Remembering his body against hers, his arm around her waist, his elbow at her collarbone, holding her strongly to him, within his embrace. His cool breath over her neck and the itchy bristle of his shadowed jaw caressing her cheek. The broad strength of his masculine form molded to her backside lingers like a ghost in her senses, warming up her insides, flushing her face, making her yearn for something she isn't quite sure of. What she does know is that she misses the moment by now. Wants it back. Wishes she could return to it without worrying of consequences, could hide herself away in it there, exploring its every depth, every sensation for each savoring solicitation. For the emotions it evoked.

But she cannot. So it is best to put the moment from her mind. It isn't wise that she be diverted so foolishly by such a brief innocuous encounter. She is not so insipid as her ladies, to be captured by such silly things, to fantasize so wastefully. She can't afford to be. She is Queen.

Shaking off the daydream esque remembrance, casting away the resultant warm tingly feeling coursing her veins, Mary starts forward once again, resuming her purposed stride through the halls of the castle, heading for the audience chamber freshly attired, clean from every last speck of mud and grime and careless knot in her raven locks. She makes it to the right wing and rounds a corner before something unexpected grabs her focus. A flash of familiar red gold, wild spiral flyaway curls spilling unkempt about sculpted feminine shoulders, and a webbing of unfashionable dress folded by black lace and half corset covering a rawboned body. Just the woman she has been looking for. The woman from the Masquerade solstice.

"Miss Adelaide," she calls, her voice cutting through the hush of the hall like glass.

That swirl of red and black wisps around another corner, paying her no heed, so she quickens her steps, chasing after. Passing in the corridor, she stops the lowlander by grabbing her arm and pulling her into an alcove before she can escape. Away from the main stream of pedestrian traffic, standing by a prism window that glints with watery evening lights, her grip on the woman slackens but then squeezes tighter in directive before slipping free altogether. _Do not run from me again_, that touch says. How well her subject obeys remains to be seen.

"Is there something I can do for Her Majesty?"

"Just who are you?" she fires right back at the innocently congenial query, her tone sharp.

"Pardon, Your Grace. Do you not recall our meet?"

Easing backward, Mary lifts a cool eyebrow, her hands clasped delicately before her gown. "That is the relevant question, is it not? I find myself in conflict to the issue." Then, sharper still, brought blunt to the point of shockingly, she accuses, "What have you done to me?"

But the enigma remains unstartled, collected as ever, smooth as ice. "Forgive me, Your Grace." Though her voice is aptly confused, her green eyes are keen with knowing. "I know not what you speak of." And the queen could laugh. But instead she smiles, a sharp curve of lips with dark edges to get her point across, saying no more, so the redhead continues. "Truly, Your Grace. Truly I don't. If I have offended my queen somehow, please believe my protestations, how I never—"

"The _apple_, Lady Adelaide," she cuts in stressedly, impatience winning out over calculations. "Ever since I took a bite, I've been feeling out of sorts."

So the actress bows her head, looking sorrowful. "I apologize. I am grieved to hear so."

Archly, Mary counters, "Is that all you to say?"

As her head raises just half so, green eyes flutter up to meet her guarded gaze below red lash, an unsettling type of implication in them now, how very impossibly insightful, as if seeing through straight to her inner secrets. "Perhaps it is not the apple that is to blame, but simply Her Grace has not been able to stomach the truths of heart it took to reveal?"

With deadly dryness, she challenges, "What would you know of my heart?"

"Much, Your Grace. Much." Then playfully, pointedly, switching turns like the edge of a blade, Adelaide adopts a mask of a different kind, of a feline taunting sensuality when she sways closer. "Hmm," she murmurs softly, dramatically, a delicate fingertip tapping at her chin, "Let us see now. The pretty boy prince … or the passionate rogue. Quite the dilemma, indeed."

Mary takes a sudden step backward in reflex before she stills herself, reining control back into her whitened grip, left thoroughly unnerved and now inordinately defensive as well. She must bite her tongue to catch the slurry of prickly words threatening to spill past her lips, relax her spine as it stiffens without accord, making her whole body painfully rigid as it should not be. Accusations. Unfounded accusations with no real basis. Slander. All the lowlander is trying to do is incite her to react without thinking. To make her forget her true aim for beginning this precipice engagement. The conversation has become decidedly layered, sly misdirection employed to divert her interest from its actual task in mind, but she will not be diverted. Especially not by trifling guesses over her sordid love life, or lack thereof, and especially not by this vagrant selkie.

"Who are you?" she asks again, harder this time, her cadence commanding an answer. _Why do I have memories of you? Why do I think we've never met before yet I know that I've known you as a child at the convent? What magic have you worked over me to cause such confusion?_

They will eventually come around to the truth, she believes, she will ensure, but until that time, all she receives is a cryptic evasive reply of, "Merely a humble subject of your illustrious realm, my queen. A _loyal_ subject…"

* * *

My Songs:  
Mash Spar: _Back to You_ by Twin Forks.


	9. I Buried Your Love

.

**I Buried Your Love  
**

_"I buried your love so deeply into the well of my secrets, You lost the light that made you mine, For if we ever were to reunite, You and I be merely wrongs to make right, At the start of time."_

: : :

The unmanageable but not abominable French king conspires with Queen Mary to secure her safety within his House for the future. Or that is what it will say on record. However, in open truth, he did not approach the young queen herself on the matter until the evening revelry of a carnivàle celebrating the turn of winter into spring. Marking the longest and darkest night of the year long. Paying homage to its black blanket of starry darkness by lighting up the land with twinkling strings of fireworks and dancing torches, bouncing white off the fallen snow as it only just begins to melt. A beautiful sight to be certain. Though she appreciates it as she arrives, she finds herself unable to enjoy the spectacle on her own. Of too maudlin a mind to revel. Too sober.

It seems she is oft alone these days. Her ladies are always wandering their own ways of late. Her fiancé is doing well to keeping his distance. His father, on the other hand, has no qualm for getting close. When he deems to acknowledge her existence, that is, such as now.

As he approaches, gruff but keen King Henry in all his rugged greatness, his royal charge feels an acute sting of alarm. Swallowing her unease, she pushes that feeling into a background simmer, reining in her cool as ice composure, once more as mild as a red wild rose, however painstaking it be a task. He finds her seated with poise by a fire flower display and is quick to dismiss the smarmy lord having beleaguered her ear by his incessant talk of Malaysian woodwork artisan.

"Come," he says shortly, offering out his hand negligently, impatiently, already looking away, and so she takes it without word and allows the king to lead her off. "Walk alongside me, Mary." He takes her without heed to assent in his stray, diverting away from the fellow festivities toward the water edge, away from the lights and the loudness and any prying passersby who should wish to overhear. She feels incredibly small beside him, so tall and broad, with the fullness of his furs to make it worse, comparing her diminutively. But she always tends to feel like a small child again in his presence, this man that is not her father, that has been far too preoccupied to be either warm or cold to the girl. She wishes she could remove her hand from his grasp, but it is fastened tight to her fingers as they meander, and though the limb itches with the discomforted need to be loose of his calloused touch, his foreign familiarity of grip, she knows better than to start their interchange on such an impolite note of offense. Though he does that for her anyways when he begins bluntly, "You've gathered you are not safe here."

"Yes," she drawls flatly, slightly patronized, "I've noticed."

"I seek to rectify that issue."

"Your Grace?"

He is gazing off over the black waters, glinting onyx under the silver moon above, smooth with the calm of the river flow, almost entirely without ripple. She might as well not even be here for all he considers her presence at his side. So it is with benumbed shock that his next words startle her, catching the girl off her guard, so unexpected as they are, said so simply, so succinctly, as if taken for granted as fact. "You will likely be queen of all this glory someday, my dear, of my kingdom. Though I admit the alliance is yet to be bound irreversibly for political purpose, I may also share my desire to see that it comes to fruition, should the winds allow." He has never spoken so openly of such things before, not in her presence, not to her, and so she finds herself stunned speechless, bewildered by where this might be going. Although he never glances her way, his eyes take her in all the same, for his next statement is a mild chide. "Don't look so stupefied, Mary. There is cause not for such uneasiness. We are not of intimate terms, you and I, but I have watched you growing from a babe. I have witnessed your evolution from an unruly highlander child to a quite admirable young woman, blossoming like a rose while you were away from us here in France." Finally, he has released her hand at last. She drops it swift to her side, rubbing fingers against her dress, feeling it tingle with nerves. The king turns from her further, placing his back to the girl as he faces the river, looking on as if foretells the future before his gaze. "I should be pleased to see you play mother to my lands once I am gone." Breath hitches in her throat. She stands staring at his broad shoulders, not knowing what to say, how to take this, or what it means. "You will make a fine ruler one day, Mary. Certainly, yours are better hands to leave France in than my Catherine. I should shudder to think the ruin she would wreak without my reign."

"His Grace speaks too coarsely of his wife," she censures, disapproving of such blatant display of disloyalty, even with how much she dislikes the elder queen, how much she knows this be truth. When he turns a look over his shoulder at her sharply, surprised rudely by her sudden stern liberty, she compresses her lips and dips her chin just so, bowing her head in deference without actually breaking eye contact between them. She will not tolerate such disrespect in her presence, not for a man to his wife, not for a king to his queen, especially not from the father to Francis. The issue is a sore one, his likeness to his parentage, his mentality of how a king shall treat his queen, and she knows she must disabuse him of the notion yet has no honest notion of how to begin. Her place in this nation is precarious. She is on thin ice. And yet she mustn't behave so. Such a fine line to walk. No wonder she is frazzled and indecisive, her moods mercurial, her ideas so changeable. But while she is afraid of having offended the monarch too greatly, his severe expression melts away after a tense moment or two, his eyebrow cocking in interest at her, insult replaced by amiable intrigue. And with that shift in him, she finds this to be the first time the resemblance is present for certain, for the fact that Francis is not his only son, not even his first or favorite is absolutely unmistakable. This is the first time she watches the king's face and sees Sebastian instead. The effect is eerie and leaves her torn on what to think. What to feel. "His Grace did not bring me out here to discuss my potential for reign."

"Yes. You are right." Turning back from her now, he takes a breath and shakes off his diversion, firming to focus again. "It has been made clear to me that someone in possession of power has set their designs on your fall within my home, Lady Mary. This must be rectified."

"Obviously. But how?"

"I have plans in mind to handle the situation, but I cannot set such in motion with you so near, for it will compromise your safety. Therefore, it has been worked out by unanimous arrangement with your visiting uncle, on order of your mother, to secret you away to an undisclosed haven until such time as it is safe for you to return to Court here."

"You are sending me away again?" she asks, her voice soft and vulnerable like that of a child, incapable of preventing it from slipping past her lips before her control catches onto composure, a sudden instinctive lurch of dread and panic in her stomach and higher still, tightening her chest, constricting her throat with its grip. "But I only just returned…"

"This has no affect on the alliance, Mary. It will only be for a short time," he assures the girl, impatient but promising, not wanting to deal with a histrionic episode of feminine proportions, not knowing better than to expect such displays from the young and tempestuous Queen of Scots. She may be temperamental, but she is not a fool, and would never allow herself such folly.

With that in mind, she licks her lips, swallows in struggle, carefully moderating her demeanor. "Where is it I will go?"

No one but the king himself, now Mary too, and the one who will host her knows such insight. A select few chosen guard will accompany her and only one of her ladies, none being told of their destination nor permitted to stray once they arrive, and she will leave as soon as is feasible to slip from Court without undue attention being paid. He heartens her with this detailed information to soothe her womanly distress, unaware she would rather her question just be damned answered as she asked it.

"Your Grace," she interjects stiffly, "Please."

The king turns towards her once more, his rough features set like still stone in royal business, his hands clasped behind his back. He sighs his brief weariness and says stately, "Lady Diane has offered to welcome you into her home of Château de Chenonceau. It is a safely discreet distance yet not so far from the throne. The residence is isolated. You will be secure there until your return. Diane will be honored to have you."

"You want I should hide myself away with your former mistress?" she questions incredulously. Though she holds nothing against Diane de Poitiers, it seems an odd idea. But certainly better to be there than back to the nunnery all alone.

"My son will stay to your side."

This statement surprises her most of all. "Francis cannot leave Court."

King Henry turns his piercing dark gaze back on her. "Not Francis."

Mary pulls back. Her face blanks. Fingertips at her collar, all she says is a soft, "Oh."

: : :

Once the king departs, she finds herself left a solitary figure, a lonely soul set at the very edge of the glorious epicenter Fountain of Diana. Her pale skin is shiny with the dim moonlight and her rich black tresses twined about her bared arms by many wild braids throughout the thick of mane. The obsidian excesses of her decadent gown spilling around her like a cascade of black waterfall, contrasting brightly against the white stone of the carved fountain and the light layer of snowfall. Her fingers trail faintly through the rippling surface of sparkling water within, not minding at all the bite of its coldness to her sensitive flesh, feeling as if it pains her back from a shroud of clouds, from flying high up above, completely ungrounded, not from unbound happiness but only a sense of utter dreading surreality.

Until said son appears before her, breaking the haze, reminding her of the world around her spinning ever on. Bash asks her for a dance, holding out his hand with a charming grin, those blue sky eyes sparkling, and all her troubles melt away for just a moment when she looks up to find him standing there and smiles back. She takes his hand, after a hesitant glance for their surroundings, with the first warmly genuine expression of the night. He leads her out to the platform stones and turns to face the girl. They embrace as proper for such a rite, if not all too eagerly for the innocent indulgence, and begin to step.

Something she does miss about the convent is the quiet. The freedom of being able to do what she liked, when fancy struck her, no prying eyes recording her every move, watching for blunders, plotting her failure. If she were there, if _they_ were there, she could do what she wanted in the now without worrying of repercussions. She could follow her heart. Her spirit. She could be here in his arms on the stone amidst the night lights without pretending it isn't what it is. Pretending it isn't about the only thing keeping her head above water around here. As if it isn't the only thing here allowing her to breathe. These moments when those eerie blue wonderful eyes are looking at her, looking through her, right into the inside, and all at once she feels herself again for the first time since fleeing her homeland. Everyone around her here wants to use her for their own gain, as if she is an expendable pawn rather than a ruling queen, wanting to take from her, to position her aptly, to cast her aside to keep in their pockets for future leverage. Everyone is after something out here. Everyone … except Sebastian. Her one true friend. She grows so tired of pretending he means just nothing to her, just brother to her betrothed, pretending to all she would not be lost without him, even to herself. His hand splays warmly at the small of her back, bringing her closer still, until their breaths mingle in the cold night air, until her hooded gaze skates upward to lock onto his own as he stares down at her with those eyes, staring straight into her, always only ever looking at Mary, driving her breathless. He touches her innocently, intimately, and the significance of each spot of her skin he brushes makes her acutely aware of each one, of the soft tingling heat left behind him, a sensation she does not recognize for what it is, for longing. For _want_. Because it is. And she does. She _wants_. She wants _more_. She always wants more. Her whole life, she always wants more than is ever allotted her. What more she wants, she isn't sure, only that it is. She wants more from her life. More from the world. Wants what she will never have. God, she misses playing freely in the wind. She misses the wild anonymity of the highlands. She misses the moors.

Mary doesn't know why being near to Sebastian makes her miss them more fiercely.

"You have saved me from a horribly dreary evening," she tells him, her tone playfully grateful, obliging his lead as they waltz about the stone, malleable in his arms, responding to his touches as he twirls her and turns her, matching the music.

Bash raises his brow, smiling along to her lightness, quipping irreverently, "That is what is to be expected of any respectable gentleman, Your Grace. We mustn't let you bore of us."

"Not you." She laughs, raven tresses and obsidian gown swirling outward as he is spinning her of their joined grasps overhead, and throws her head back through it. "Never you."

"Thank the heavens! I would be devastated."

When she spins into him on return, her fingers fall accidentally to his leather covered sternum, pressing firmly to the taut muscled expanse beneath. Her airiness sobers to a softer contemplation as she is reminded of his brush with death some season back on her behalf, such a recollection fast to darken her mood, bringing up the burden of it still carried privately on her soul.

Secretly, she had visited him in the apothecary many times during that trial, alongside the aid of her exceedingly sneaky ladies-in-waiting doing her bidding while she busied herself fretting for his waning welfare. It would not have been advisable with all that was going on at the time to be seen expending so much attention and energy on the bastard brother of her yet broken betrothal, wounded in her stead regardless, and so she had had to be overly cautious to avoid any prying eye, waiting for times in the dead of night while the castle slept to slip in wholly unawares of the rest, choosing her opportunities when she would not be missed, when Nostradamus was absent from his physician's duties, and she could sit by his bedside. His deathbed, some would say, as much as it angered her to overhear. As much as it weakened her. She would sit by him as he lay unconscious, sick with fever, ashen and damp from loss of blood, and listen to him moan through his fitful sleep, killing herself to be there, to be so very inept at aiding him in his need, to be so horridly powerless in this one thing of utmost importance. When she was not there looking over him like some secret unknown angel of her own selfishness, perched at watchful post in a shadowed corner, she would lay awake with worry. If she would be the death of Sebastian de Poitiers, Francis would never in his lifetime forgive her. She would never forgive herself.

He never knew she was there. Not once.

Feeling the ghost of a wound that almost took him from this world, a wound sustained while on errand for her, for her country, for her people, for which she still bears the burden of guilt for, and the arc of shocking cold she felt when she rushed in and found him being lifted to a sickbed, blood spilt everywhere, so much blood, his skin so pale, so slick and sickly, incoherent as he was, Mary goes still in his grasp. She never wants to experience that feeling again. As long as she lives, she will do anything to avoid it. That horrible agonizing helplessness. That fear. That sickening of the soul. That was when she knew what he was to her. How important he had become.

And that scares her too.

She has been fighting it ever since.

Sensing the change in her, he dares such boldness as to catch her chin with his fingers and tip her face up to his searching attention. She is sure she has paled, has gone shaken, recalling it all, every awful second of the period. He smiles that smile at her then, that wickedly warm and richly devoted smile of his, and her dark wanderings are abruptly washed away. Just like that. They linger in the depths of her still, of course, but when she matches that smile, it is earnestly, dark eyelashes shuttering lowly lidded hazel eyes loaded with revealing emotion, expressing all her hidden truths, and the darkness abates.

That is the magic he works on the girl. On the queen. That is where the danger lies.

* * *

My Songs:  
Mash Waltz: _Start of Time_ by Gabrielle Aplin


	10. The Only Soul I Chase

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**The Only Soul I Chase  
**

_"__F_ollow deeply into the darkness fallen, For yours is the only soul I care to chase, Holding within it a part of mine."

: : :

A fortnight forward, a siege upon the castle is concocted in absence of the king. Mary is sitting in the tapestry chamber with her ladies, irritable Queen Catherine a few seats away with her own, when word reaches them that Château d'Amboise has been set upon by enemy forces, a small but obviously formidable faction led by Lord Vincent. Apparently, from the rushed whispers she hears as the guards assemble and frantic arrangements are made, he is a discontent duke of Court who has been outspoken in his unhappiness with the ruler. To try such blatant treachery is unthinkable, and yet the evidence is irrefutable, because while King Henry has taken most of his fighting men to the Spanish border for handling a significant skirmish erupted there, his royal residence is such swiftly overtaken. They are after in force the dauphin to serve as hostage, a crown prince making excellent leverage, but what they come upon instead is the two queens standing together to greet their uninvited guests in the audience chamber.

Their guards are dispatched and the ruffians hold them there to bear witness for a dramatic entrance from their lord. To be addressed discourteously as he has failed to find his true goal of such a foolish violation. Honestly, Mary is shocked at the audacity of this man as he struts in from the long hall like a preened peacock in his prideful fervor. He cannot possibly think to come out of this still with his head. He must be deranged. He shows no respect for the monarchs before him, only an offending presumption as he regards them, his condescending expression unimpressed, one hand resting on the hilt of his sword where it dangles from his hip in its scabbard, his men at his back. However smug and insulting he may be, he will never survive the night. She is sure of it. Absolutely sure.

Unless he gets his hands on Francis.

But the queen of this kingdom has assured her precautions have been taken for that matter. She must trust in her competence, must concern her concentration on keeping herself unharmed, unseen as of any real value in their efforts. Which is not all that feasible, from the way his eyes find her form, lingering down and up again, his steps slowing as he paces the length of the two women stood side by side against him, each cool and regal as they should be with composure in the face of his invasion. Queen Catherine and her scathing words of demean slide by his notice as he moves closer on the younger one, his seedy gaze suddenly intent in a new way, his scheming brain busy at calculating her many ways of usefulness. Taking her chin, he pulls her upturned face to make her meet his stare, her eyes having fixed right past him, icily above his presence. Her fingers clench as they keep clasped before her, held to her stomach, her red lips pressing firm in displeasure at this so repellent liberty taken.

"Where has your beloved gotten off to, fair Queen of Scots?" he asks, voice sly and snakelike, whispering across her flesh like something vile, making her want to do violence against his person. She must clutch her hands tighter together to resist reacting foolishly.

Bitingly cold, her hazel eyes sharp when they meet his own, she speaks through gritted teeth. "Remove your touch from me please, Lord Vincent." Each word is clipped with deadly warning as she demands it. Then lowly, softer, "I shouldn't hate to have to hurt you."

This entertains him, his brow rising and his edged grin brightening with earnest amusement, such a dark insidious sort of gleam entering his gaze as it studies her. Taunting her with a stroking finger down her cheek. She pulls stiffly away when he refuses to relent, not stepping back to give even an inch of ground, for that would be a sign of weakness, but making sure to turn her head at enough of a yank to leave his grasp stung and her decorum intact. She can feel the cold appraising eyes of the other queen watching her closely from beside and slightly behind. Saying nothing of it. Unmoved to interfere. Not that such would have been welcome.

Leaning into her until his hot breath caresses her face, coming invasively close, he lowers his own voice and rasps darkly, "You _will_ tell me where Dauphin de Viennois is hiding in the castle, like the little coward he is, and you will live for it." Stepping back then, having said his piece well, he casts a derisive glance toward the elder, unswayed by her scouring look of ire, and harrumphs. "Just like a child, to run and hide, and leave his women to face the enemy for him."

"I was not aware we were enemies, Lord Vincent." This from Catherine. Calculatingly nuanced. "Though that has been assured today. You have made a grave error of judgment in coming here." She tuts softly, mockingly, adding a haughty, "And so ill prepared at that."

When his arm strokes out then, striking her across the face by the back of his leathered hand, Mary lurches in her place, a startled gasp escaping her parted lips, hand flying to cover her mouth, her eyes wide. Past the surprise at the sudden violence in such civilized circumstances is a succinct sense of aggrieved fury. She may not like Catherine, but she certainly respects her, and that was uncalled for. Inexcusable. These are not savages in the Blood Wood. These are their noble people. Should he not find Francis, she has a feeling Catherine would swing the axe herself. Cheeks flush, brow furrowed, features taut with anger and danger, she turns on him with the spitfire temper of her kin and pushes him back at the shoulder, so unexpected of her by the man that he stumbles in his stance, almost losing his footing completely. She is not so senseless as to try to grab for one of the many weapons sheathed within her reach and wield it against him and his faction of soldiers, for that would be a bloodbath, but she isn't so afraid to have pushed her luck.

The treasonous men at her back are on her instantly, latching onto her arms, one for each, bracketing her in from both sides, restraining her halfhearted struggles within the bruising grasps. "Take her to her rooms," he says, gritting his teeth, fists clenched at his sides. "Let her think on her options awhile." And so she is hauled off from the audience chamber by her two captors without ceremony. Escorted back to her quarters and imprisoned inside. They shove her roughly through the archway then seal the door behind her as she stumbles forward, catching her skirts to correct her feet. The two keep posted right outside, making her a prisoner to her own chambers, and she collapses hopelessly to the canopy in her initial distress, finally given free rein of itself as she is out of sight.

Once that passes, for distress is a useless state which she quickly bores of, Mary pushes upright, galvanized by restlessness from a need to take action, and finds herself pacing the floor furiously, her skirts swishing across the stone, her mind working for answer. There must be something to do. Some way to fix this crisis. And there are many, she knows, but what can _she_ do? All on her own. She must find help. Must find Francis…

No. She needs Sebastian. He will know what to do.

But first she must find a way out of this gilded cage.

Before the frustration of being at a loss consumes the girl, she is preempted. The passageway door behind her changing screen creaks ominously open across the room, disrupting her thoughts, presenting the perfect solution. "Clarissa?" she calls uncertainly, hesitant in her motions when she crosses beyond the screen and steps slowly inside the darkness. She is aware she could be making a grave mistake, but no other options appear desirable, so she ventures deeper, securing the seam shut behind her, plunging her into utmost black. She follows the shadows along their tunneling, straining her ears to hear the faint muffled echoing sounds indicative of which way she should go, and eventually finds herself in the dungeons below the castle, a subterranean network of misery kept cloistered from the civilized light of day overhead. This is the absolute last place she wanted to be right now, or ever, but knows better than to ignore her instincts. At the end of the passage, she sinks to her knees into a careful crawl while it shrinks in size, becoming more of a crawlspace than a tunnel, culminating in a grated exit masked by rusted iron latticework looking into the arc of a dank and wretched keep.

"Go on then, you entitled bastard. Hold your tongue! Let me have some fun."

The gravelly voice thick with lewd malice draws her eyes to the right side of the dungeon cell, deciphering the two contrasted silhouettes of men casted against the stone wall beyond them by flickering torchlight mounted to it nearby. One is Sebastian. She knows it is even if she cannot see his face from this angle, in light so low, and her body tries to move her forward without consent. Reining herself rigid with willpower, she stays curled where she is and listens. He has been chained to the wall and interrogated on the whereabouts of his brother, from what she gathers, and having been giving them quite a fair amount of trouble for their efforts thus far. Which makes her smile, however uncharacteristic of her, gleaning some uncivilized sense of vindictive verve from the fact. Though that small bit of pleasure sours as soon as she sees what he suffers for it. She crouches low in her hiding place, covers her mouth by hand to stifle any reactive sounds she makes in protest to what she sees, wanting then _needing_ with every fiber of her being to intervene.

Soon she loses the battle of restraint. And so she emerges.

He is knocked to his knees by a blow to the gut and glances up to spot her as he coughs it off, eyes going wide with shock and dismay, but she puts a finger to her lips as she eases closer and he quickly looks down, schooling his expression to avoid revealing her presence, to avoid directing danger her way. He taunts the interrogator, glancing haggardly up at him through his dark hair, spitting blood as more drips down his chin, grinning with a show of teeth stained red as he laughs, insulting his efforts at persuasion, keeping his attention, as she approaches with a chain in hand. She holds it carefully as to avoid it chinking noisily, as carefully as she plucked the loose stray up from the floor, as carefully as she unhinged the grated barrier and set it aside, letting her slip free of the cramped crawlspace and creep forward across the shadowed distance, dirty water dripping puddles onto stone as her feet step softly, soundlessly closing the gap. Winds it about both palms, fingers furling fiercely, and then she strikes, hooking the rusty chain around his neck from behind with a vicious yank. He draws his half sword and she thrusts her knee up into his spine, sending him forward toward Bash, who catches his wrist before he can drive the weapon backward and instead flips the aim and sinks it deep into his stomach, surging to his feet behind the thrust as best as his shackles allow. Their eyes meet past his shoulder and lock as the crude interrogator collapses to the wet ground between them, and the two waste a moment staring low in stupor, absorbing what has happened, acclimating to the strange new parameters of each other and their circumstance. Breathing together into the quiet. Existing as they stand one before another in the dark.

Snapped free of the daze, he turns his focus back up to her slack face, immediately angered by her interference. By her utter recklessness. "What are you doing here?"

"I came through the tunnels," she tells him, willfully misunderstanding, her voice breathy and soft as she kneels to rummage the corpse for the key she requires. After locating a likely suspect, she works to free him from his chains, keeping her numbed attention low on her task as she avoids all the admonishing intensity coming off his piercing stare.

Heatedly, bringing his manacled hands together for her, he persists, "You were supposed to have escaped the grounds with Francis and his convoy!"

Mary pauses in surprised relief. "Francis got out?"

"As much to my knowledge."

Though the rusted mechanisms give her trouble, she works them loose and the chains clatter to the floor between their feet. Freed, he rises straight again, pulling her with him from her crouch by his hands closed over her own, key getting lost in the spool of shackles as it slips from her grasp. Eyes still downcast under protective sweeping lashes. "I was detained alongside Queen Catherine in the audience chamber by Lord Vincent and his men."

The set of his mouth is resolutely grim as he swallows. "We must get you out of here."

"But we cannot possibly let Amboise fall to siege like this!" she exclaims in protesting reflex, because he has already begun to move, pulling her toward the open shadowed archway far across, his declaration taking her off guard despite it being perfectly predictable.

"_Mary_," he retorts, dragged out with exasperation, his hand tugging at hers with impatience, "Messenger has already sent word to my father on the battlefield. He will be marching return with his army any day now. Without what they have come for, Vincent and his rebels will have to flee, or risk facing a wrathful king."

Now she feels silly for her momentary rashness. Her irrationality. Pushing aside the impulse to take back the castle in some ill conceived surge of possessive indignation, she softens her stance and follows at his heels down the narrow corridor, unable to see her hand in front of her own face in such undiluted darkness. As they reach an intersect that leaks light their way from the path out, she pulls him back into shadow of their past hall, hearing footfalls scuffing the damp stone so near. Hand splayed firm to the front of his leather jerkin, she keeps him burrowed against the wall with her there, waiting for them to pass. Their bodies pressed close together, so close she feels his heat, his muscled masculine strength, and the breath of his chest as it rises and falls, his heart thumping beneath her fingers, she goes breathless herself, lips parted and throat tight as she stares into the light of his eyes looking down at her from so near, so bright that the orbs penetrate the blackness, lessening its suffocating effect.

Moistening her mouth, she takes a tentative breath for speech and says so softly to him then, footfalls fading into the distance with every passing heartbeat, "I heard what he had warned you. Your brother. That day in the meadow."

"Mary—"

"To maintain your distance from me," she goes on heedless, still softer than she has ever been but insistent on getting this out now. "Do you mean to oblige?"

"You mean obey?" he counters sharply. She is acutely aware of the breadth of his large hand as it presses into the small of her back. "Obey the edict of my future king?" There is a revealing touch of bitterness in his voice where his face remains smooth. That touch does unsettling things to her. Makes her feel horribly out of sorts. Makes her feel horrible. For all its connotations, she does not wish to examine. Especially when he makes reference to his state of being so very expendable in the scheme of things here. "The message was clear. There are those who are of great value, of who come before all other, and then there are those with no value at all, who exist amid the prominent by grace of goodwill alone." The ugly truth of his mild words makes her chest constrict near pain. Softer still, ruefully wistful, he turns his head to look down at her once more. "Apparently, I cannot afford to test that will." And then he turns away.

"Bash," she says, because she cannot bear to leave it there, hand finding his leathered arm and bringing him to a stop again, to turn and face each other in the dark. With exception of that night they danced among the revelers, he has been avoiding her ever since the dauphin had interrupted their sparring match, ever since she left the two to themselves, overhearing snippets of their tense exchange of words, half truths and masked meanings layered below double talk in her slow wake, of a territorial Francis with upsetting intuitions warned off the bastard brother from his fiancée. And now she knows why he gave in. "Please do not think—"

"Mary," he interjects, his voice hard and impatient again, cutting through their whisperings. "We must keep moving."

Stubbornly, her fingers on his forearm tighten, dragging him back to her when he tries to go. She is steadfast with her feet to the ground, quietly spirited in this, fiercely focused, and sincere in a most adamant way when she tells him, "You are my friend. My _greatest_ companion. Your value is without measure. If you think I would _ever_ see a misfortune to you, so long as my power possesses an inch of influence, you are gravely mistaken, sir."

As he is frozen stunned, awestruck by her fierce assertion, she brushes pointedly past him then, striding forward down the next corridor, following the trail of light leading them to a stairwell up into the mass of the castle and on. She is not quite hurt but definitively offended that he would be so swayed by Francis and his unimplied threats, that he would have such lack of faith for her in this, think so little of her as to assume she would cause him disgrace with her affections and allow harm to come to him because of it. To lose his standing here with his family. No, she takes it back now. She _is_ hurt. When he catches up to her, reaching her back as she takes the first step of ascension, pressing in protectively close while they climb, she is driven to stop again, to turn on her heel and round on him midway up the narrow stairwell, still bothered by this matter.

"You are no dispensable thing. Do you understand?" He doesn't so much as nod, standing still a step below her, gazing up at the furious young queen with an indecipherable expression of blue sky eyes that sear into her soul. Licking her lips, she blinks, looks away, shaking her head at it all. Hesitating with a lull of energy, her countenance shifting to something sadder, something serious, no less meaningful, she continues, "I don't care about kings, Bastian. I don't care about their heirs. I am Queen." Face gone stone cold hard, she turns her head back and levels him with a royal look. Brooking no latitude in this. "And you are not expendable to _me_."

Captivated by her strength in this, her fierce cool steel, he is thoughtless in his next actions, unable to prevent it as his hand comes up, strokes across her cheek to cup, his fingers delving into her hair, clutching wholeheartedly as his thumb caresses such softness. They gravitate closer as if spellbound by their gazes, drawn towards one another without mind, her lashes lowering to lure, her tempting lips parted just so, breath stolen. Noise of approach from above startles them apart. Hand clenching harshly where he cradles her, Bash pulls her down the steps to him, swinging her swiftly behind him, lifting the sword he commandeered off the felled interrogator when they are set upon in the claustrophobic stairwell by enemy rebels descending to their depth. He manages valiantly to keep her at his back to be between her and attack as he takes on the rushing swarm, but the confines of the stairwell combined with the disadvantage of possessing the lower ground proves troublesome, protecting the young queen with sleek brutal counters to all their offensives, ruthless in his reply, parrying blades to fist the fabric on a shoulder and ram the man headfirst into the wall before kicking him down the following stairs then arcing the sword around overhead to catch the next downswing of another, bent buckled at the knee at the impact to get leverage for shoving it off as she cringes away from it behind his left shoulder, burrowing into the wall as best she can. Seeing the fight begin to tip in their favor, she sucks in a bracing breath and leaves him, darting down to the bottom of the stairwell, stealing the loosed sword off the unconscious man he dumped down here before hurrying up again to join in.

It goes quickly from there. The two work fluidly together.

When the last has fallen, Bash turns toward her in the orange flickering firelight from ahead, exasperatedly disapproving. He wipes the back of his wrist across his brow, rubbing off the blood and sweat smeared there, and pantingly volleys with his normal arch, "Still refuse to tell me where you learned all that from?"

"I told you—"

"Yes, yes," he dismisses, grabbing her hand and pulling her with him as he runs.

Once outside, having acquired a saddled mount to set her on a secret path out of Amboise towards his father, he stops and looks back at the castle for the first time. Putting the leather reins into her hands, he sets the steed trotting on the path and steps back. But of course she pulls it up before it can get anywhere, looking back at him in confusion, concern creasing her beautiful face. She starts to curve the mount when he shakes his head, staying her turnabout.

"I'm sorry, Your Grace. I must find my mother."

Realizing then that he means to send her down the path towards where his father will come on her own, without him, so he may go back inside to find Diane. This will not do. Fingers flexing over the reins, she circles the mount off the path to a nearby posting tree. "I'm coming with you."

The girl dismounts to hurry with him but he catches her by a palm to her lower stomach, urging her backwards. "No, Mary. Get back on your horse."

"Bash—"

"_Mary_."

Though he had stealthily dispatched the soldiers posted as sentry about the route they slipped free of the castle from, and those guarding the stable so no one managing to get by could go far, but there are more making rounds. They cannot afford to stand out in the open arguing over this. Which is exactly her point. Clasping his hand, she squeezes it tellingly then bypasses his obstinate stance to pave the way. He can only curse her stubborn spirits, can only rush to reclaim her side, leading her in a secret entrance closest he can get to the wing his mother is sure to reside within. They find Diane entertaining Count Vincent of all things, instead of Queen Catherine as should be, and must work together to create a distraction for him and his surrounding men so they may claim the artful woman from her chambers and slip away.

Which is vastly easier said than done.

Rather than a damsel in distress, Lady Diane is unfettered, ever in her element nevertheless, merely raising a curious wry eyebrow when the young queen sneaks in to rally her up once Vincent is drawn away by Sebastian's diversion down the corridor. The pair, now three, reconvene around a corner to the other junction, his tricks having led the enemy astray.

Through the atrium by the grand Fountain of Diana, so nearly beyond the walls of the château, a swell of rebel soldiers corner the threesome in, appearing in their path with rallied calls to come. Bash shoves Mary back behind him with a forceful order of, "Go." Diane takes firm hold of her arm when she resists, urging the reluctant girl along with her as she hurriedly retreats into the shadow of the belvedere. She is instinctively resistant to leaving his side to face them, her vehemently torn eyes going to his mother as she tugs her to move, not understanding her willingness.

"Bash—"

"Take her away from here," he commands, no room for arguments, never glancing their way. Before she can, he is set upon by the rebels all at once in a surge, holding them back.

The two women withdraw further into the belvedere corridor bordering the outer wall but do not stray far from there. Diane tries to pull her, but the farther she gets, all the stronger she resists, becoming flat out refusal by the time they reach the corner that would take them into the tunnels, into the secret passageways that wind the castle. She is not leaving him like this. When she breaks from his mother's pressuring grasp, spinning and hurrying to the belvedere edge, it is only to see him nearly overtaken.

"My son is a survivor, Your Grace. He will be fine. Come with me."

"I cannot."

"Your Grace—" A hand lands upon her shoulder. "Mary…"

Fingers clenched in the holes of the belvedere lattice edge, she shakes her off and goes rigid. Looking over her shoulder, she pins the older woman with a grave stare. "He isn't going to get out of there if we leave him."

Diane searches her face for a short moment before her eyes skate beyond the girl to her son out in the atrium, surrounded by enemy, barely fending them off. She is right. But the queen must come first. Except…

That is her only son. If the little Scottish queen wants to rush in to be at his side, who is she to stop her? Perhaps they may make a difference in the balance after all.

"Come then," she decides, firming with resolve, "We have wasted precious time."

With that alone, both break into a sprint, rushing the winding length of the border belvedere to reach the opening, to get into the atrium. They only just make it to the threshold of the archway when he is harshly disarmed, blitzed from behind and the side simultaneously while still defending from frontly, and they are still too far away to do a damned thing for him. He is to be run through with a sword, beaten down to his knees below five hulking men, when Mary yells out her protest to reach him, gripped by gut wrenching panic and desperation, by excruciating helpless opposition. Screams it with everything she has. A surging fire from the flames of torches hung to stone along the rounding atrium wall bursts outward, blasting into the soldiers with a wall of heat so strong it knocks them back. Burns them.

Shocked, blown backward a ways herself by the pressure of its surge, Mary stumbles forward, dropping low to her knees, grabs Bash off the ground, and they stagger away together before any enemy recovers. In the canopy shelter of the belvedere, Diane leans heavily against the stone wall of the castle interior, looking for the first time rustled. Her eyes are wide and her face has paled, watching the raven-haired wildling with a wary knowing in her mien. The three propel shakily into the direction they need, back toward the corner with the hidden entrance to the secret passages, Bash half leaning on her as they go, his arm hooked about her shoulders, his weight slacking down onto her as best he tries to keep it to himself. She supports him up well enough, absently enough, but shakes under his touch with confusion and horror and sick clammy dread.

"That—" Her tone is stunned, and guilty, hesitating when they reach the hidden hatchway, "That wasn't—"

"Hush, Mary." He is intense and insistent in his dismissal, quieting her words before she can do more to incriminate herself, firming to be willfully unknowing of what he just witnessed of the girl, of her many secrets, a few more dangerous than he could have ever guessed.

_That wasn't me_, she wants to say. _I don't know what that was, but it wasn't me!_

Some things are better left unspoken. Some defenses only give gravity to suspicions.

Sharing a worried look with his mother, who is all too knowing of the matter, of what it means, what they saw here tonight break loose of the young Scottish queen, he brushes a quelling hand over her hair as they hurry inside, a careless familiarity of touch, silencing her damning struggle. Halfway free, she hesitates, dragged to a halt by indecision. She looks back over her shoulder and he knows what is on her mind, having been pulled to a stop by her hand connected still to his own, looking back at her looking back in the narrow darkness of the passage.

"Your ladies are of no consequence in this quarrel," he soothes, "These are not marauders. They have come with a specific purpose. You are the only thing of value left in this place, Mary." He holds out his hand, fervently urging yet checking his impatience, as Diane observes by ahead. She nods, steeling herself to leave them behind, and grasps his outstretched hand in hers again, lets him pull her swift through the tunnels and beyond.

Would follow him anywhere, she is afraid. Even into the dark.

* * *

My Songs:

Royal Siege: _Follow_ by Breaking Benjamin  
The Couple That Kills Together: _Survival of The Fittest_ by Skylar Grey

_AN: Though a disheartening number of people are reading this, I want to thank those of you who've taken the time to share feedback. What little there is, it is incredibly motivating._


	11. A Sacred Thing

.

**A Sacred Thing  
**

_"Secrets are a sacred thing, An inescapable inevitability, And we shall hold our own, To each us all, Even from ourselves."_

: : :

The girl has power inside of her. An old great magick.

She knows this now, knows she has heretic inheritance in her blood, from her paternal legacy, and that if the world ever found out the truth of her, she would burn, royal regnant queen or not. She knows this and finds herself accepting it rather remarkably without note. There are so many other matters pressing her attention, stressing it, matters which threaten her life and prospects. This new revelation is merely another tribulation to take into account among innumerable affair. Though she does wish fervently she could speak with her mother of this. Speak openly and safely. There is so much lingering confusion, she ought not know where to begin to sort it all out straight. And the wildling is no help, for they left her behind in Amboise.

Not that she feels she could trust that one.

Lady Adelaide Kinsley is a Hellene. A pagan. Unlike those which plague the Blood Wood vast, but of the same kind in the end. And she is up to something. Mary knows this, senses it clearly with their every encounter, and knows to keep a wary eye out for her machinations. Whatever she has come to France for, obviously something involving the young queen, it will likely cause trouble for her and her company. She wants the girl to believe her a benevolent benefactor from the shadow, to believe she is watching over her like a fey guardian, but Mary is sensible enough to see in her so much more fey than guardian. These newly unveiled memories regardless.

"_Take hold of the flame, little Mary. Take it in your grasp," she commands, her graceful fingers a soft touch caressing the girl's bare forearm, rustling the fine hairs along its surface as they stand together there in the little abandoned cottage on the hillside, focused on the rickety wood table that holds a melting candle at the center with its flickering wick._

"_It will burn!" the girl exclaims, hazel eyes wide in protest at the suggestion, even as she feels its call beckoning her forward, a heated shock of sensation coursing her veins, alighting nerves to let her know all is right if she wants to give into the pull, to kiss the fire._

_Her dainty hands curve strongly about the girl's bony shoulders as she bends low to her ear, gripping her tightly in assurance, in encouragement and insistence. "Not if you embrace it truly. Not if you bend it to your power."_

"_My power is unpredictable at best, Lady Kinsley. We both have seen its madness!" She recalls the whip of icy wind on the hilltop, the mad crash of waves on rocks below as a storm lashed up to its full frenzy around them, her screams beating through the force of it as it blew her hair and skirt and she ripped herself from the woman's directing influence. "Can we not return to archery?"_

"_You have mastered the physicality of your lessons, little Mary. Now you know this fully well. We must address your magick. If you ignore its force, it will punish you for your disregard."_

"_I'm afraid."_

"_I know, bonny. But we must train your limbic pathways. If you do not hone your control over this beast then it will control you."_

Control you. Yes. She remembers the startling rush of hot dizzying sensation taking her breath when the fire burst outward, surging toward the rebels, as if welling up from inside and exploding free of her body, feeling the fire in her veins, setting her aflame. But it didn't hurt. It was glorious. It was magnificent. Something that could easily become intoxicating. Addictive.

The closed carriage carrying her away from Amboise, away from Francis and threats on her life, is crowded and deafeningly quiet. The stillness would be awkward, bottled up with everything that goes unsaid, if it not for her so diverting distraction, attention focused beyond this cage, her face turned toward the shrouded window, her eyes watching the lush scenery pass them by as they go, seeing another setting entirely, seeing the past and its many secrets only recently revealed to her. Being secreted away to Château de Chenonceau, Mary sits with Lady Diane de Poitiers across her, keen and enigmatic Duchess of Valentinois, her son Sebastian beside her, restraining his focus on the women within all round him, uncharacteristically solemn today, as the rest of them have come to be as well. With her lady-in-waiting Greer sat at her side, hip to hip, Mary gazes unseeingly out the opening as they take a road along the coast with its jagged rocky cliffs and striking greenery. Not nearly as sharp and wild as her motherland, but a pleasant countryside to be sure. Guards ride before and behind them on their path forward, a discreet detachment of accompaniment that to which keep her safe but go unremarked by any they pass. The whole arrangement is about enough to settle permanent unease into the young queen.

Unfortunately, such an atmosphere is neither unusual nor soon to change.

Recalling a conversation both convoluted and incessantly vague with the red-haired wildling before she was to be hustled off under cover of night from the royal residence during aftermath havoc of the disastrous castle siege, which ended poorly for all involved once King Henry arrived, Mary dwells unhappily over its contents, darkened by the overhanging cloud of potential misery, her mood maudlin ever since.

"_You again. Come this way. We need a word."_

"_Yes, Your Grace. How may I be of service?"_

"_You know full well what you may do for me. I want answers. I want the truth."_

_And instead of them, all she got was, "How well do you remember childhood, Your Grace?"_

"_Well."_

"_Do you recall your saddest moments?"_

_The girl turns away, looking out over the grounds through the arched opening cut from stone, properly diverted from course once more. "It always rained." Her voice is thick with remembrance. "I love the rain, but it always made me sad when it came."_

"_No, my queen. You have that backwards."_

_Mary turns her head sharply toward the strange woman. "Excuse me?"_

_Adelaide is as smooth of expression as always. "It was the other way around."_

"_I don't know what you mean."_

_Brow lilted, she blandly tells the girl, "It rained when you were sad."_

"_Excuse me?" she says again, her tone thinner this time, ever more incredulous._

"_Your grief brought upon the fall."_

"_I have no notion of what you could possibly be implying," she cuts past with stony resolution, "but I know that you should not finish doing so."_

_Before she can stride dismissively away in a regal toss of skirts, Lady Adelaide catches her arm, bringing their bodies in close, pressed together at the sides, her voice low and her lips near when she promises, "You will remember all you need to now, Your Grace. You will understand."_

"_I don't—"_

"_Yes, I know. But you will."_

_Feeling dazed, shocky even, Mary sways on her feet as the other woman releases her grasp and walks away, leaving the young queen behind to flounder alone through the unknown._

When she was child, it rained when she cried. It stormed madly as she raged. She knows this. Sees it in her mind now, as she would any other childhood memory, a bit fritzed at the edges but otherwise intact once the redhead released her with those whispered words of intention. The nuns never knew the extent of their relationship, when she arrived posing as a Sister Anna from Stirling to ingratiate herself at the convent with her future queen, she was careful to keep their closeness concealed from the others, sneaking off with the little girl, only aged nine years so far in her life, spending their days out in the hills, by the roiling sea, cold air biting their pale skin and puffing all their breaths into smoke. She began speaking with her gently, patiently, eventually turning toward the secrets the girl kept from all else, secrets about the strange happenings always in occurrence wherever she went that ought not be explained as anything supernatural. Then, once the two had become so close and trusted as to be inseparable, she began her lessons. First little things in arts of the old magick from the lowlands, how to detect certain things around her and manipulate others, how to quell the restless turmoil of energy inside, of that wild power wanting ever to unleash itself on the world. Then came the physical teachings, showing her how to protect herself with a sword and a bow and a knife and a firearm, how to use everything and anything around her for defense, to keep herself alive. They got good together at battle, at sparring with blade and bare hands and incorporating creatively used bows, but the real lessons were to come later. The magick. How to wield it truly. Really. Though she picked up such graceful violence quick in their time together, Mary never did take to those particular lessons. Never overcame her instinctive fear of such things enough to actually train herself in the art of controlling it. And when Gràinne died, Abbess had her banished from the region, leaving Queen Mary to fend for herself. To forget.

Oh, _how_ could she have forgotten?

It must have been some sort of charm, she realizes, some sort of witchery which caused her to lose memory of such a pivotal part of her history. Now that she remembers, she has no idea what to do with the knowledge. What to do with the realization that there is a ticking explosive inside of her waiting to burst free at any moment, doing only God knows what kind of damage, an event which will surely lead to her tied to a pyre.

"This is it." Taken from her musing, Mary pulls her fingers from her lips as she quietly fretted, finding the striking blue eyes of Sebastian on her now, straight in front of her within the carriage, his hand having lightly ghosted her knee to gain her attention. With a tip of his head and no word, he beckons her look through the window, parted shroud revealing the grand sweeping estate they are slowly coming upon in the distance. The carriage bounces shakily over a bridge to cross to it. She sees many a spire touching the sky, a long string of belvedere style arches built as foundation upon the water directly from the west side, where the massively extravagant structure sits literally over the placid River Cher. The arched bridge joining the two banks of riverbed must be the most exquisitely complicated piece of architecture Mary can claim to have ever laid eyes on. The place in its entirety as they come upon it proper puts her breathless in awe, a more expansive estate and far more elegantly glorious one than the royal residence to be sure, with its unending stretches of formal and informal gardens, its arching bridge all the way across the wide river, its grandly house and adjacencies, including a rather beautiful old chapel on an island off the main bridge of things and a solitary watchtower set by the water. The thing of it is that the château _is_ the bridge. It has been built longer of length and thicker of stature, built along the shape of the arched passing on the river width, which is a bit of brilliant construction, if she says herself. And she does admire it so. Yet all she can think after the initial breathlessness of impression is that _this_ is where Bash belongs. This is where he grew up, with his mother away from Court at this magnificent place, this sanctuary shielded off from the cruel outside world, where he lived and was happy when he was not with his father and brother at the throne. Pulling her eyes from the approaching sight of marvel, she looks to his face as he watches it near, and she thinks this suits him far better than the rest.

"Indeed. Quite a place to run for." _Quite a paradise indeed_.

: : :

Adelaide visits Nostradamus every chance she gets, if only to be a bother, for how she does so enjoy making him miserable. It is a petty delight but a delight all the same. And this woman lives for her delights. In her boredom, she finds herself making more and more time these recent days to trouble her grumpy acquaintance. Today she finds him stitching up another bedridden invalid, who seems to have been run through with a dagger to the abdomen, but that wound is the least of his worries, seeing as fever and infection have already set in.

"What are you doing here, Kinsley?" he asks on a sigh heavy with burden. "Why plague us still with your imposition when the one you want is present no longer?"

Perching on his worktable aside a cluttered mess of herbs and remedies, she licks a long finger clean of the fruit glaze from a piece of cherry pie she pinched from the kitchens on her way here, watching him from across the room as he hunches over the sickbed. Blasé in nature as she shrugs. "She will return. In meantime, do a lady a favor, Damus, and entertain me."

"Going out of your mind with dullness now there is no siege nor queen to meddle with?"

"Of course I am." Her next exhalation is mournful, being theatrical as always with her pouting. "What do I have to do with myself now?"

He mutters unflattering remarks about her to himself under his breath as he squints at the line of seam his fingers so carefully stitch, suturing the injury closed for the third time due to festering. When she is finished with her stolen snack, she hops off his table and sashays close behind him and leans into his bent back just to make him irritable. Fingers to his shoulders, she begins to massage, almost as if absent of her mind, but he knows better. Shaking her off without tearing his threading, he questions, "Just how long have you been interfering with that girl anyway, witch?"

"In truth?" Sitting down on the very edge of the stool he uses so that they are pressed flush to their sides, hip to hip, she props an elbow on her knee and her chin in her palm, looking bored as she replies, "The very first vision come to me without summon was of Mary Stuart. A premonition of destiny. The girl was seven years of age at the time, right here in this very Court too, you know." He hums his acknowledgment at this, curious despite himself, distracted from his displeasure only in the thinnest sense. Her closeness, her touch, it grates on his mood even as it stirs old longings he thought himself immune to. "There was a certain potential for greatness about her, even then, and so I knew why such foresight had been given me." She flashes a bright endearing grin at this. "I was meant to meddle."

"Has it occurred to you leaving well enough alone?"

"Aye. What a waste that would be." Dropping her palm, she leans into him more, her words so clipped to be poignant as she speaks so near to his strong jaw. "My kingdom is in ruin. It is weak." That dropped hand falls casually to his leg, her fingers curling over the thigh, a light but significant pressure closer to the knee than anything too shocking. Certainly less bawdry than her normal self. "Poised on the precipice of a century of unrest." Her rich husky lowlander accent softens another several octaves. "I have seen the lasting effects such conflict will wreak and I do not pine for it to come to pass. Which direction we take from this precipice depends heavily upon choices made by young Mary, Queen of Scots, and by those who surround her."

"Your motives are pure then?"

"Contrary to your belief, dear Nostradamus, my intentions are not _always_ so very wicked, if my methods are distasteful to you." She veers so close here that he feels her soft lips whisper against his beard as she leans in and rises, her touch slipping slowly from him, caressing until the very last fingertip is out of reach. She takes a last judging look at his patient and wrinkles her nose with her evident disgust of the rot. And as if emphasizing her last point in her usual melodramatic fashion, she swipes a hand above the prone man, never quite touching but close enough to absorb the heat of his ravaging fever. Quite literally absorb, he realizes, as the burning heights transfer to her skin, radiating off her in waves to make her sway. She touches fingertips to her head as the dizzy spell threatens to take her and he reaches instinctually, holding her by the elbow, keeping her standing. After a moment of struggle, she shakes it off and her harrowed expression clears, green eyes light once more with her usual irreverent sparkle. She flashes another pretty smile, even while her body is wracked with a deep sickening shudder, her teeth chattering once or twice before she reins it. "Don't look so worried all the while, Damus. Life isn't so bad."

As she says this, Adelaide traces hot fingertips lightly over the furrow in his brow, past the dark fringe of hair always hanging over into his vision, just a brief fleeting touch upon the expression of his constant gloom, of his brooding moods, always so disapproving and weighted, before she leans down and surprises him mid frown with a soft sweeping press of those soft lips to his tense mouth. Then she is gone. Leaving him staring into the nowhere of his empty apothecary. The stillness once more returned. He is highly unsettled.

When he looks back down at the sickbed, he finds the man with a healthy color into his pallor, his injury no longer festered and red, his chest no longer resounding that distinct death rattle each time he breathes in and out through his sleep. The temperature of his skin is a normal coolness just as the blackening rot around the edges of his wound have all but gone.

That woman is something he will never understand.

* * *

My Songs:  
Mash Moments: _Female Robbery_ by The Neighbourhood.


	12. I Lose Sleep

_._

**I Lose Sleep**

_"__I lose sleep, I lose sleep, Dreaming of the many things we might could be."_

: : :

Arriving at her new haven, Mary takes the intent of her seclusion to heart and soon drifts from present company to explore the manor on her own. She walks the gardens amidst the afternoon as the sun sets on the horizon, sinking into the lovely water of the river as its pools reflect that shine, glides silently through the winding corridors of the house, wandering aimlessly down long halls in relative shadow as every towering window up to cavernous ceiling stays blocked by heavy hanging drapes of velvet red and gold rope, not content to sit and acquaint herself with her new chambers, resistant against the instinct to seek out companionship with the others of the house, even that of her trusted lady Greer, who seems more melancholy than Mary to have left Court without notice, having apparently some secret paramour she wishes desperately to get back to. Not that she has confided in her queen of this, but the girl knows these things, knows her lady well enough to have recognized the signs. It seems everyone around her has found love. Has happiness. Has the choice to indulge in such innate human right as the Queen of Scots will never be given.

Now with this new way of confinement, of secrets to keep that threaten her head, Mary feels it is her destiny, _must_ be her fate, for a tragic end. And misery in between.

So she walks the halls, existing within the swallowing solitude, driven from polite company by having found herself heartsick. Times like these, she misses things most of all. Misses her mother. Misses her home. Misses the convent and its simplicity. Misses the innocent rush of infatuation she once held for dear Francis, her betrothed, her beloved, before politics and adulthood interfered. Before her girlish joy for him soured by the realities of his grown temperament. The dreadful spike of hurt and humiliation she first felt at realizing how things between them would be, how isolating it would be for her to be his queen, to be his wife, for she would never be the only one, never be a cherished or respected figure in his life. He may claim to love her now, but the kind of love he has to offer is not what true love should be, not what she had dreamed it would be. Nothing has been what she had dreamed it would be in this world.

_I have magick_, she thinks, still vaguely unable to comprehend, running fingers delicately along a line of aged gold-scrawled binds filling every shelf of every wall of the esteemed great library on the northeast corner of Lady Diane's château. An estate far more splendid than that of d'Amboise, sprawling greater in distance and space, set back from the world like her own personal paradise, certainly cared for in beauty with love, designed to be more of a hallowed place than the castle, more of a home overwhelmed by personal touches of its residents. Though that makes the house greatly welcoming, unlike the cold intimidating presence of the royal residence, it also lends to it an inescapable sense of loneliness. For unlike the castle, it is terribly empty, as if the vast silence is filled only by the ghosts of its history. _I am a heretic … I am a witch_.

Perhaps a grand lonely manor overrun with the hollow mourning of the past is exactly where she belongs, where she should seclude herself, never to be immersed in society again. Her life has been made up of hiding away. She thought things would be forever different now she had come to France and to Francis, but she was evidently wrong. Should she spend all her days on this earth lost to the outside? Locked away? Is that what will become of her? No love, no reign, no joy or desire, nor any real pleasure. No greatness.

This house leaves her grieving.

She sees why it is one favored so sentimentally by the former royal mistress, but it is neglected in the ways that matter most. This place should be opened to light and laughter. It needs a family within it once more, a true family, exuding love and joy, littered with lovely children. That is what this marvelous house deserves. Nothing less.

And so she finds herself awake late that night of arrival, seeking solace in the lonely quiet of an athenaeum. For it is impossible to rid a restless solemn spirit from her with such reminders to every unfortunate essentiality of her existence. She thinks maybe reading a good book will make her mind stop spinning miserably as it does. This is where Sebastian comes upon her.

"Your Grace should be asleep." His deep smooth tones do not startle her enough to flinch as they pierce the quiet from across the great library. She feels him approach, coming up toward her from behind in patient steps, and she stays where she is waiting, caught admiring the lavish stacks standing tall above them from all sides. His presence at her back warms her skin, rouses her nerves from their numbness, making her dulled attention sharpen, making her stimulatingly aware of him in correlation to herself, of their proximity. Such a subtle crucial thing. "You need rest."

"Do not presume to coddle me as a child, Sebastian." She angles around at this, not quite fully but enough to give him her profile, and the slight quirk to her mouth softens the rebuke of such a quietly serious tone of voice, softens it into a half playful thing. She moves further down the row, easing toward the undraped window stretching high above, breaking in between the rich shelves. He follows once more, coming to stand beside her as she browses absently under the moonlight, his hands clasped behind his back, his eerie cerulean eyes fixed forever on her face. She does not try to gain space again, letting him stand close, letting him study her, but neither does she express anything concealed beneath the surface of her tranquil desponding mood.

"Forgive me," he says softly, solemnly, his cadence caressing her as surely as bold warm hands moving about her body in worship, more profoundly because it gets beneath the skin, stirs up her every nerve ending. "I would ask how you are settling in."

"Well. Thank you," she responds politely, if not stiltedly, trying to convey her ill equipped mien for entertaining companionship this eve, her need to be alone.

Instead of accepting the cue, he presses closer toward her side and shares, "I had hopes that Her Grace would find comfort in my home." He pauses. Voice dropping lower, softer still, he says, "But she seems distressed."

"You pay too much attention to my moods, Bash." Looking his way at last, she offers a fleeting reassuring smile, brushing off his insinuating query. "They mean nothing."

"If that is what you insist."

They talk quietly, familiarly, and she is pulled reluctantly from her mire by his intent insistence, unswayed by her attempts to halfheartedly send him away, leaving her to her troubled loneliness. She is drawn then into questioning his memories, wishing to sate her curiosity about his life before her arrival, before French Court with the king. _Find comfort in my home_. She wonders what it was like for him, if it was the way she imagined, worse or better still. He isn't a man well accustomed to speaking of himself though, is reluctant to do so, for the first time ever earning an awkward edge to his always charming with just a pinch of wicked disposition at her innocent instigation.

"It was a normal boring upbringing. Yours is much more interesting, I would say."

"Mine. Yes." She sighs, feeling the reminder of her problems. "Isn't that the crux."

Ever aware of her, Bash surmises, "You're thinking of the atrium."

Which makes her glance sharply his way, turning so her back is to the window, leaving her pale skin and black tresses wreathed in silver illumination. She leans her shoulders gingerly to the glass, watching him with wary hesitance, fear filling her at that normally so safe intensity behind his eyes. "What do you mean?"

"Mary," he says, drawing out her name in patience, "You have nothing to be afraid of from me. I would never endanger you. Exposing your secrets would do just that."

"I know," she returns on a shaky breath, wetting her parted lips as she does, strengthening her indecisive stance, "I know you wouldn't."

Cocking his head, he wonders, "Did you know you could do that?"

"No."

"I see."

"Do you?"

He turns to the side, a faint rueful smile etching his mouth as he goes, replying with mystery, "More than you could imagine."

She finds herself following when he seeks perch on a harpsichord bench backward, his elbows resting on the ledge guarding above the keys at his back. And so she slides in beside him close to his hip the proper way, facing the grand instrumental, beginning by tapping idly at the ivory notes as he looks on, pretending to not feel the weight of his focused gaze, letting the stringed music fill up the space where all the things he isn't comfortable sharing would be, before soon transitioning into a masterful piece, slowed and haunting in its melody.

The surprise that flickers in his features at her skill unfurls a brief thrill of simple pleasure in her while she plays. A rare piece of instrument still almost a century after invention, not many people are proficient in its art who aren't musicians, especially women. But the young queen never ceases to surprise him, in everything she does, everything she is. He sits and watches her, waiting as she is swept along with the piece, earning some vague short-lived respite from her conflicted musings, feeling all the more enamored every quiet moment that passes.

Mary wants to ask what he meant, pursue the glimpse of depth he teased, of understanding in the matter of her magick. How could he be so accepting? Shouldn't he be repelled? Shouldn't she be cast out? Burned? At the very least, he should not still be looking at her with that same awe he always displays in her presence, that same inappropriate admiration. Yet instead she plays chords. Fills the midnight hush of the athenaeum with her music. Lets him watch her like he is bewitched. Like it aches.

When the piece crescendos to silence, his gaze lingers on her hands, splayed above the keys, unmoving after the melody is finished, poised there as if in wait. "Mary…"

"Have you ever felt so alone in a crowded room you can't catch your breath?"

"No," he answers, as if it were as simple as that. But his eyes say differently.

Turning on the bench to face him, she is suddenly intent in her diversion. "How many times is it now you have saved my life?"

"Less than you've saved mine." Then before she can jump points again, he reaches out to catch her hand where it still hovers above the keys, pressing a firm touch to the delicate fingers trapped in his grasp, stilling her thoughts for a startling second. "Mary, I—"

"I'm sorry, Sebastian." She cuts in on him quick and vehement despite his attempt to quell her enough to listen to what he is driven to confess, even though it pains her to do so, a spike of panic lurching her heart up into her throat for a terrible moment before she calms. "I am confusing you. I've confused myself." Gently flipping her hand within his clasp, she furls her caught fingers over to his knuckles and squeezes tellingly. Then escapes from the hold. "We should be to bed."

His abandoned hand falls to the harpsichord beside hers. "We should."

"It's just been a trying fortnight. I'm not myself these days."

"That's understandable."

"Yes. And now I am diverted with…"

"Missing Francis?" he guesses.

A moment goes by of charged suspension before she perfectly retorts, "Of course."

Though she has conviction as she says it, she doesn't know herself whether it is the truth or not. Or its entirety. Though it must be. She must marry his little brother, his half brother, for her people and for her crown. There are a million things on her mind tonight bothering her but Francis must be one of them, must be the most important of all, because that is the way it has to be. No. That is the way it _is_. She will marry Francis. And her mystic Scotland will be saved.

Perhaps if situations were different, if her nation were not so in dire straits, she would follow her heart. But that is not what the fates have allowed.

"If you'll excuse me, dear Sebastian," she murmurs softly, absently, and slips away, leaving him staring regretfully after her into the darkness. _Longingly_.

: : :

Love is a most cruel thing. But _desire_ … well, desire is dangerous.

He calls her name from down the hall, following in her wake, finding her in the shadowed hush of a deserted corridor outside her private chambers. She has nearly made it inside when she hears him coming, when she is aware of his pursuit in a sudden jolt of panicked nerves, of rushed breath. He says her name once more, voice raspy and winded, as he catches her by the arm, pulling round right before she reaches her threshold, open doorway beckoning them passage, for neither dares. The pull spins her too far toward him, bringing the two flush together, chest to chest in the narrow darkness there, surprise and hesitance warring with a shocking swell of compulsion, of fierce need. Her hand splays to his chest between them, fingers bunching in the loose fabric of his white tunic, so thin to her touch, hanging unkempt off his strong sinewy structure, and she becomes distracted momentarily from why she put her hand there to begin with, eyes darting down, licking at her lips, swallowing the excess moisture that has gathered in her mouth so abruptly, her breath having just hitched sharply and her heart hammering beneath her breast. Eventually, after a frozen moment in tense heady stupor, she remembers what she intended and pushes him back.

"Bash." Her own voice is embarrassingly breathless. "You shouldn't have followed me."

The dark intensity of his focus on her is knee-buckling. "I had no choice."

"You had a choice." She almost cannot bear it.

Shaking his head slowly from side to side, he argues, "I'm not so strong as you think me, Mary."

Pained, she turns away, warding off his unguarded revelation. "Sebastian—"

He reaches again for her then, undeterred by her stern stubbornness, his long fingers grasping her by the curve of her side, slipping beneath her arm to take trespass, pressing at the edge of her bowed back to urge the girl forward in one brash confidant tug. She is pulled pointedly up against his body and her breath leaves her in a gust, head tipping back to accommodate his taller stature, feeling dizzy with panic and dread and a rush of exhilaration, his heatedly intense presence a sure sign of her approaching damnation, a temptation that torments her like no other has such power, his towering closeness stealing her breath away for good. "Mary," he says after a stretching silence sizzles between them, whispering her name past parted lips, drawing her eye downward toward it, sending a shiver through her at the sultry sound.

_I want a taste_, she thinks miserably, helplessly, feeling overwhelmed, _I want it all._

This desire is a maddening thing like nothing she has ever felt. A thing with life of its very own, swallowing her whole, all but _consuming_ every bit of her resistance, every bit of her fraying sanity. It is a wrecking desire, banging down doors, climbing up walls, begging for more, bartering to be sated as the dangerous thing it is. To take a taste. Even if it means her ruin. Because she knows she could never walk away from there.

She wants him to hear her scream. However wicked she feels for it, she wants it still.

When he slides his second hand over her collarbone, curving around the nape of her neck into a tangle of luscious curls, fisting tightly there, pulling her into him, she tries to draw away, tries to not give in, whispering softly, "Don't do this to me." But her voice is stolen as his mouth captures her own with slow steady advance, pressing firmly together, silencing the last dregs of her resolve. Her hands fall to his shoulders, grip hard for a second or so before sliding off, settling at his chest, delicate fingers furling there, her nails digging into sun-kissed skin, into taut carved muscle below. He traps her to him in the kiss, bodies molding tantalizingly together, a scandal of an embrace. His arms crush her within their grasp with delicious but unsatisfying strength. It makes her want more, want harder, fiercer, and so she arches hard against him, straining on her toes, hooking about his shoulders to pull herself, practically climbing up his body when he drops his hands to bracket her waist and whirls them, slamming her into the tapestry wall across the corridor from the opening to her waiting bedchamber, flickering candlelight from inside the only sliver of faint illumination that touches the dark hall.

Hand leaving her hip, he catches one thigh in his grip and hitches her leg up against his torso, hoisting her body off the floor, pressed hotly against his own as their mouths meld. The kissing is a graceless passionate thing of tongues and teeth and soft lips tangling together that shoots tingles through her every nerve ending, from her fingertips to her curling toes, making her hungry for it, for him, making her frenetic with _want_. He pins her to the wall with his body, bending at the knees as his broader muscled form rubs across the bowed length of hers, grinding hard ridges and strong limbs into soft curves and firm mounds, every dip and valley and rise and peak being stroked into some mad glorious fever. Her fingers catch roughly at the cropped strands of hair at the back of his head as he drowns her in pleasure, in electric raptured desire, his tongue stroking along hers as he pulls back and nips her lush lower lip between his teeth, dragging it out. Lashes fluttering open, she appraises him in shock with liquid dilated eyes, dizzy from the storm of it, feeling molten and wanton and absolutely desperate for this to— Never. End.

"Bash," the girl pleads, purrs, her voice huskier than she has ever heard it.

"Stay with me," he begs her, an edged urgency in his graveled tone she does not understand, his big hands smoothing the messy tresses away that have gotten sticky with sweat and plastered to her face, stroking her cheeks, her temples, framing her pretty features with each of his palms, admiring the heavy uninhibited ardor to be found there, a hooded lusting appetite to revel for. Face caught in his hands, he forces her to look into his eyes, those sharp eerie blue eyes burning in envy and yearning and demand, a crystalline piercing ferocity, and murmurs, "Mary, please."

She has been waiting so long for him to hold her close. She couldn't resist.

But she shouldn't be here. She can't do this.

As she realizes that, he begins to slip from her grasp. The vividness of sensation starts to dull. Her overwrought focus sways off center, coming undone, and she wants so desperately to cling to him and this moment, to this forbidden felicity. Only the harder she holds on, all the faster it slips from her reach, never to be realized again.

_Stay with me, Mary. Stay with me._

Alone in bed, Mary tosses through her sleep, shifting from one side to the other as she moans, her brow furrowed with strain, with striving. Twisting beneath the brocaded duvet and silk sheets in the hollow darkness, her neglected body fidgets and writhes in craving. Her heart aches.

* * *

My Songs:  
Mash Dreaming Seduce: _Go_ by Delilah.


	13. A Precious Melody

.

**A Precious Melody**

_"If I would write a symphony of sound, You would be my most precious melody."_

: : :

Counting stars. She used to lay on her back on the hillside, with flowering meadows stretching out from every direction, except the rocky wild crest of the cliffside that drops steeply into the sea with its melodic ebb and flow, a deep unbridled serenity of abyss as far as the eye can see, a misty frothing fringe along the coasts, its fierce lapping whitecaps that crash against the rocks below. She used to lay on her back there flat with her hands clasped on her stomach or sometimes thrown wide overhead as her body splays and she would stare up at the night sky to count the vast canvas of sparkling stars, entranced by their burning embers so untouchable above, breathing in the crisp midnight air as it iced her nose tip and numbed her fingers, having snuck out from the convent as the strict sisters slept inside.

Looking out across the country, she thinks she could do the same here and be just as happy as she once had been. More so, perhaps. With exquisite de Chenonceaux striking in the background, a comforting bittersweet reassurance to keep her grounded, she feels she could be so happy here. Realizes after thinking this that she already is. For the most part.

After her daily exertion with Stirling and her lady, Mary is left alone in the sprawling gardens, wandering toward the hills when Bash walks up from the distance, holding onto the reins of a pair of premium mounts, a bay stallion and a palomino mare. As she turns and spots his easy approach, her somber face takes on a bright broad smile she just can't help. She bunches her flowing skirts in a free hand at her side and steps his way. They meet at the edge of the formal gardens, a soft wind rustling their hair, blowing her skirts and shawl in a lazy dance of fabric. She reaches out to stroke the horse closest her along the nose as she greets him, but the creature cranes his neck past her to pinch the half bitten apple in her other hand, chomping it out of sight before she can pull it away. Affronted but for a split second, she gives up into amused indulgence, patting his smooth pelt and sharing a laugh with Sebastian.

"Well. There goes my midday meal."

"You should know better than to lax your guard, my queen."

"Apparently!" she laughs, eyes going wide a beat and head canting at his lack of sympathy. Scratching lightly at the stallion's ears in absence, her focus is solely on the man holding his reins. "What brings you out with a steed more than you need at hand?"

"I thought you might want to ride," he replies, stroking a strong hand gently across the shape of the fair mare between them. His always striking eyes are a piercing silver in the cool daylight. "Though the stables are yours to use as accord, I noticed you hadn't ridden in all the time that you have been here with us."

"I thought it best I keep close to Chenonceaux. Seeing as I am unfamiliar with the region here, I wouldn't want to be spotted by the wrong gaze."

"Well then. That settles it. We will ride today." Offering her the reins to the mare, their hands graze as the leather strap is exchanged, and he moves across her back, alighting a brief touch to her hip to urge her to switch places with him, guiding her more toward the pretty palomino than for her initial place beside the bay. She doesn't resist his absentminded maneuvering because he is right in his reflex choosing. The stallion is a bit too wide at berth for her to sit astride comfortably. "There is nothing to fear while I accompany you. No one knows this land better. And if we should encounter any trouble, I shall protect you."

"Will you now?" she teases, keeping with his lighthearted manner and playful claims. "It seems our record proves it is _I_ who is just as likely to be saving _you_ should we find trouble."

"Granted," he concedes, ducking his head in assent to her point as he comes closer, moving to boost her onto the mount.

Mary halts him with merely a lilted look before he lays hands on her. An incredulous correction of his thoughtless assumption. Raising his brow, he takes a theatrical step backward. Watches her hike her skirts and haul herself into the saddle swift with a satisfied gust of breath that mists itself in the air when it leaves her parted lips, speaking to the enhanced paleness of her lovely skin and the sharp flush of her cheeks as if she blushes, a silken strand of black tresses swinging with her to stick across her face at the mouth until she irritably huffs it away.

"There is something I want to show you," he tells her once they are both mounted and reined, corralling around to head toward the north.

They ride together at last for pleasure, no outrunning threats or risking lives, slowly at first but steadily gaining fervency. He takes her over the meadows and into the trees which border his land on all sides but the river, passing through the great wood to a faraway inlet cove of the river Cher, hidden away like a secret paradise, a beautifully breathtaking vantage point by which to look out over the entirety of the region. He takes her to his favorite spot as a boy, she is told when she sighs an awed expression at the sight once they arrive and dismount together to stand side by side near at the very edge of a jagged bluff and admire the view. The falls are the highest peak in the land. The height leads to a certain marveling quality in beholding the distance.

"Standing here makes me want to fly," she confesses, her voice breathy, her eyes sweeping at the varying sights from this high. "I can see why you loved it so." Then, angling a wry look his way for what she says next, she prompts, "I would ask about mischief your boyish self got up to here." And she wants to know. She really wants to see it. What he was like. The life he led. His avoidance heretofore only makes her inner thirst for such insight press at her all more incessantly.

Observing this in her beyond the thin layer of faint teasing, he hesitates with reluctance a beat before finally giving in, sparing her mercy. With a roguish half grin, he cocks his brow and asks her, "Are you sure you want me to show you?"

"Unquestionably."

"Then come this way," he says, clasping her hand in his own to pull her along.

"Bash," she says, vibrating with sporadic laughter as they hurry down the winding inclined cliff, coming round to a secondary tier, "Bash, be careful." The second highest peak of the region then, he lets go of her hand and she stops where he leaves her, watching with wide open eyes and a grin when he continues ahead, finding an outcropping that stretches along the cliff face, climbing out to the ledge of it and edging farther into the falls. The fierce rush of water flowing over the bluff from above to splash into the basin below sprays out some feet forward from his narrow pathway, so he only gets misted rather than drenched as he goes, getting himself across to the center soon, where he disappears from view, much to her sudden stab of dismay. "Bash!" After an anxious beat of her hammering heart or so, she hears him call for her, worried eyes searching the falls to finally spot him a tier above her now, having found a forbidden lip between the two currents of waterfall, concealed beneath the eaves of rock that jut out overhead. Relief and thrill mingle as she huffs at his reckless display, for panicking her, however briefly. He teeters at the very edge, barely bearing the slippery uneven cropping keeping him from his death, and throws his arms wide for her sight, reassuring the girl of his safety, of his reveling in the petty adventure he knew she would enjoy. And despite her disapproval, she can't help but smile, laughing loud and weightlessly as she looks up at the man, his messy brown hair slicked down by the moisture, his grin crooked and charming. Her heart thumps in her chest for a different reason at the sight of him there. Her insides flutter. Evidently, it is all she can do to not burst. Feeling brash, feeling brave, wanting to distract herself from this unsteadying sensation, she cups her mouth and shouts, "Wait! I'm coming up!"

"What?!" he shouts back with an uncomprehending frown.

It is better he didn't catch her assertion, so she doesn't stop to repeat herself, just gathers up her skirts and knots them together away from her feet as she inches tentatively out to the ledge. Much to his abrupt urgent disagreement. Which she innocently feigns not hearing. If he can do it, she can too, despite his vehement protestations about the danger.

By the time she reaches upward and clasps onto the cliff edge of his perch, her hands and shins are scuffed raw by the rock and its wet surface, a struggle to have found purchase at all to lever up for his level. She goes slow to avoid a fatal mistake. But she _does_ make it up, if only to be snatched swiftly from her climb and ripped over the edge into the relative safety of the epicenter of shelf, held hard in his grasp, bracketed between his hands as they cinch bruisingly around her shoulders in his distress. She doesn't shake him off as he shakes her soundly because she is quite unbalanced and fears slipping right off the side and being swept into the forceful cascade.

"What were you thinking? You could have been injured. You could have been _killed_!"

"Oh," she scoffs, dismissively annoyed. "Don't be so dramatic, Sebastian. _You_ did it."

"_I_ am not a girl. I am not a _queen_!"

"I should hope not," she quips, her lips quirking slightly with wry humor he is in no mood for, because he is furious. Looking over his shoulder, she arches on tiptoe to get a good look and grins. "This is incredible!"

Shaking her once more, shaking sense into her, he insists, "You could have been—" Cuts off. Notices the marks marring her exposed skin, and that there is much too much skin exposed of her to be decent for a lady, let alone a royal, definitely too much for him to stand, and immediately he begins running the lightest touches over her scrapes, checking for severity before he so hurriedly unknots her skirts and rights the fabrics to cover her up. Admonishes, "You _are_ injured."

"Only a little," she retorts, dismissing the issue with a suddenly stiff lip. This is the first time he has ever treated her just as a gentleman inevitably treats a noblewoman, in that belittling manner, and she isn't altogether fond of it. In fact, she greatly resents it under normal circumstances. Now, coming from Sebastian, who she so values because he mostly treats her with the respect he would give another man, with the equality he would a capable soul, she is torn between being amused by his harried lapse or impossibly unhappy about it.

_I am not a girl. I am not a queen._ Why should either of those things be a limiting label?

"Lord knows how I am going to get you down from here."

"I'll follow you," she says simply, "I'll get down however you get down."

Exasperatedly, he utters, "Mary…"

"Bash," she counters evenly, patiently, but with no nonsense allotted from her low husky tone. She finds grip at the inner bend of his arm, her fingers furling over its curve as the leather sleeve threatens to slide her off, his arm raised somewhat between them there because his own hand has found the column of her throat and grasped it about the nape, about the graceful curve of its side, lost in her tangled tresses as they spill all around. Framed in by rushing water from above and a sky stretched out ahead beneath the lay of the land, its deafening roar as the currents pitch forward overwhelming everything else, isolating them from the rest of the world, she is tempted to make a go of it right here. And never leave. Or at least not for a very long time. "Bash, look. Turn around." Once he does, reluctantly rotating without releasing her, she continues, "This place is spectacular. I owe you a great debt for sharing it with me."

Although her gaze is caught by the landscape, his blue eyes are fixed on her face. Always hers. "The debt is all mine, my queen."

"I'm not—"

"You are."

The sudden whispering intent of his voice makes her turn toward him, caught again in a hold, only this one isn't a view of the world, but lost in the churning devoted depths of his striking stare as he stands beside her there. She is frozen. Drowning in his eyes.

"You are my queen, Mary. Not Catherine. Only you."

One hand flattening to her stomach as she swallows, as she struggles to maintain her sanity, her ever wavering clarity, she finally finds her voice enough to tell him, "And I should protect you exactly as so." Her other hand falls away from him. Then lower, softer still, "Give you all I have." _Every last bit of me._ Lord, does that thought scare her. She has to look away, focus on the view, fighting with all her mettle for clearing her clouded head.

They joke and play just fine, but when the burning intensity overtakes him, she cannot breathe for its demands, for its affects on her peace.

After awhile, both are in agreement that it is time to leave. They make their way cautiously to mainland from the bedrock only to discover their premium horses have wandered back without their riders. "They do this from time to time," he tells her when she exclaims, shrugging shoulders, not bothered by the implications of a weak breaking. If it were warhorses they were discussing or a mount for hunts, he would feel differently, would be stricter. But that laidback rogue element to the man is what drew her to him like a moth toward flame to begin with. So they begin the trek on foot back to Chenonceaux in good-natured moods, if still a little lingering awkwardness persists for the first leg of it. By the time they reach the treeline with the château in sight across the hills, however, all traces of tension have evaporated from their chemistry, each distracted together into a blithely carefree temper as before.

Leaving the falls and their complicating moments of truth behind, she falls backward against a flowering birch tree at the very edge of the wood and tips her head aside towards him behind her with a pretty challenging smile. She is tired out of her breath and flushed, still damp from the falls, but her energy is boundless when she wants it to be. When she refuses to let it wane. And so she says to him, "Last one back to the manor loses his dessert privileges."

Without waiting for him to comprehend, she pushes off the resting tree and bends at the hip, quick and mischievous as she tugs free of her shoes and takes off toward its looming magnificence in the distance, her glorious laughter chiming in the wind, left in her wake, her head thrown back and her hair flying with her skirts like some beautiful wild child untethered to civilization's rules. Like always, he can't get enough of the sight. But as her challenge registers, he feels a spike of hot exhilarating competitiveness and surges after.

"Why, you villainous little cretin," he mutters to himself, sprinting up a steep incline of hillside to make it up to the wicked girl. He follows her out across the countryside, racing up and down to traverse the rolling contours of land that stretch far between the wood and the estate, almost but not quite catching her a time or two, exhausting himself with laughing exertion as he matches her game of playful chase. Runs the hills.

At the top of a steeper peak midway, he overtakes her from behind, his longer legs and wider strides paying him favor, also the lack of hindrance as her heavy skirts provide. He snatches her by the waist without slowing his upward progress and swings, momentum taking them both with it in a blitz of motion neither can control, driven thoughtless by the rush. They spin, go rolling together down into the valley, coming still at last from the flurry, collapsing into the grass onto their backs side by side, his arm trapped around her, breathless and happy beneath the summer sky.

The race is declared a forfeit. No one loses dessert.

That night after last meal, she is brought close in his arms under the stars of the garden terrace and they dance slowly in the moonlight. Because she told him of her longing for dancing again. Told him of her secret nights spent counting stars. How she loved the night as a child. Misses its fleeting safety and solace. So of course he takes her wordlessly by the hand and leads her out to give her back a little of that old magick. A magick that has nothing to do with witchcraft or heresy. A magick that hasn't the power to get you burned.

Even though she senses eyes watching her, watching _them_ from an illuminated window above, she doesn't mind in the slightest, doesn't worry on what their watcher is seeing or the conclusions such an observer will come to. She doesn't mind how inappropriate such an intimate embrace is. How horribly scandalous, however innocent it is. She just shuts her eyes and revels.

As she is held, Mary turns her head against him while they sway, resting her temple to his chest beside where her hand lays flat to him, presses her nose to his throat and breathes him in deeply, remembering so many things, never having felt more contented in her life. And yet more pained. Realization unfurls slowly but inevitably within her. Acceptance comes with it.

He toys with her hair, absently twirling soft strands around his fingers as they move just barely, easing back and forth beneath the night sky, and she is reminded of Francis. Beloved Francis back in Amboise with his mistress of the month, with his half choices and his outright lies, when he cares to lie at all. With his empty declarations and his false promises. She thinks of her childhood love, her future husband, forgetting the cage that comes alongside his love, the chains that bind her to him and his father, to his nation, and she realizes at last the absolute truth kept buried deepest of all inside herself, a truth she could not admit to her own mind before this moment. As it becomes suddenly inexplicably unbound, it is a truth that cannot be denied.

Mary doesn't want an unfaithful king…

She wants a loyal bastard. She wants _this_ bastard. No one else.

* * *

My Songs:  
Mash Ride & Run: _Blue Eyes Blind_ by ZZ Ward


	14. The Game of Hearts

_._

**The Game of Hearts**

_"Requited affection is that which sails smoothly upon the sea of true emotion, Yet the game of hearts is hardly won by thus, So thine be yare, Lest thou befall defeat."_

: : :

The most radiant thing he has ever seen. She is pure and light and magnificent and she takes his breath away. He really needs to stop watching her. He is trapping himself in the deepest mire. Going down, down, down. He needs to _stop this_. Where they rest above his head against the stone edge of the window casing he leans against, Sebastian curls his fingers, going tense with conflict. He knows what must be done, what should be done, but he just can't take his eyes away from her. Would that he could, he might be spared this doom that has set upon him ever since he first laid gaze upon the young queen of the Scots.

"You have allowed sound advice to go unheeded, my son."

Bash doesn't react to the appearance of his mother at his back. He doesn't try to pretend he is doing anything other than what he is. Staring foolishly down into the gardens, where the girl and her lady skirt along the aisled walking paths, frolicking carefree around her beloved pet Stirling. There is no sense feigning dispassion with the lady Diane, for his mother is too keen a character to be dissuaded from her intuition, from the observation a blind fool could make. Her disapproval is a palpable force wrapped about him. Not a new sentiment when it comes to his attentions toward the Scottish wildling. She seems wary of the girl, wary of what her presence will lead her son into, and warier still of the repercussions to her time here in France.

"I cannot say I haven't made my attempts to do as you directed."

"I only look to your safety," she tells him, laying hand to his shoulder with motherly consolation as his gaze stays fixed through the prism window. "We cannot choose who we love. What we can do is control the outcome of such compromising feelings."

"Can we, mother?"

"We can," she sternly insists, moving to his side, making him glance askance her way.

There have been several words issued to the bastard prince regarding the lovely Mary Stuart from the concerned royal mistress, seeking security for her only son, a dangerously besotted man, but none have made a difference. He has known all along what would come of allowing himself to grow fond of the girl, to become attached, and none of that assurance has kept him from falling. _Harden your heart to the girl. She will bring nothing but discontent and grief._ Does she think he is unaware of this? That he is fool enough to believe anything more could come of it? _I warn you only because I see there is a great thirst inside of her to match your own. A thirst … for you, my son._

"Having her here is making things worse," he confesses, his voice low and deep from his throat as he divulges so reluctantly, so very conflictingly, revealing the turmoil brewing within.

"Perhaps I should send word to Henry—"

"No!" he snaps, softly but vehemently intense when he turns sharply toward the older woman, his passion for this matter taking her aback for a composed hesitation. In her so knowing silence, he reels return to his sedated manner bit by bit and calmly but firmly states, "Mary is safest here. We will not compromise that for sake of my own failings." Eyes on his mother, he declares coolly, profoundly, "I _will not_ see her harmed."

Just as forcefully, Lady Diane returns, "Then you must banish her from your thoughts, my love." As her child turns back to the window, turns his solemn crystalline gaze back to the pretty wildling in the gardens, she shifts her clasp lower from his shoulder to his arm and tightens that hold when she orders, "You must guard your heart from this girl. For everyone's sake."

Gravely, facing the glass, Bash confesses, "Mother, I'm afraid it is far too late for that now."

: : :

Life in French Court is not nearly as interesting without her little queen to meddle with. In fact, by the time the official start of spring rolls around, Adelaide is positively going out of her mind in utter incurable boredom. Such suffering should never be subjected to such a mercurial creature. And with contemptuous Nostradamus busy keeping company to his own queen, licking her boots, he hardly has any time to spare a glower for poor Kinsley. Not to mention other more occupying activities she wouldn't be altogether opposed to taking part in should he have a sudden drastic change of heart towards the Scotswoman soon.

Though she has had extra time on her hands to be keeping tabs over the lady's fair prince, which is a little less dragging than she expected. To ingratiate herself with a royal of strong nation is never a waste of time, she would say, and the boy turns out to be more entertaining than one of her mind might guess. She is both pleased and wearied to see how he longs across the distance for his betrothed beauty in her time of seclusion, how thoughts of her stolen away with his brother are beginning to eat away at his trusting nature, or not so trusting as it reveals itself, souring his bright sunny temperament as seemingly unending days pass without word, leaving his imagination to run wild with its ravaging jealousy and dark worry. The boy is no fool, or at least keen enough to know full well the attraction existent in each those most closest to him, enough to suspect this seclusion be the perfect opportunity for such connection to inadvertently develop. What he doesn't realize, bless his heart, is that is one connection with no need for further development. And evil Adelaide can't help but be a little amused by this interplay, as if watching a melodrama stage performance between three, aside from her own agenda affecting the matter.

However she may pity him this, Kinsley has no true sympathy enough to interfere on his behalf. Perhaps if he had been of stronger character while his betrothed had been here beside him still, he would have nothing to worry about regarding her wandering affections. After all, no woman is like to respect a romantically faithless man, a love who shows her no loyalty where it ever counts, no devotion in the most poignant of ways. Had he shown her this, Lady Mary likely mightn't have felt as drawn to his bastard brother as she had, and his current suspicions would all be groundless. But what can one expect from a Frenchman? He is no Scot.

Speaking of French fancy, it doesn't take but a suggestive sway and glance aside of evocative subtlety below her lashes with her head tilted just so to catch his eye today, drawing the dauphin easily away from the pretty little noble he is preening for towards where Adelaide idles through the hedged archery grounds just beyond the courtyard. She does coquettish in her sleep, but it never works so well as it does on a Frenchman. Or boy, she should say. The sunlight shines off his wavy golden hair, his rounded jaw softened by scruff, his stride short and swaggering from a stout less than towering stature. They are an uneven match, in many ways, for he must look up to meet her eyes, her mild playful smile, but he doesn't seem to mind.

"If it isn't Lady Kinsley."

"Dauphin de Viennois. His Grace is looking in well health this afternoon."

"What brings the radiant lady out to favor d'Amboise with her presence?"

There is a hedge left between them as they stroll lazily down parallel walking paths towards a starting point. The redhead reaches a cache and studies the selection with idle deliberation while she tells him, "I woke this morrow with a succinct craving to kill something." Out of the corner of her eye, she watches his brow shoot up in surprise and her smile deepens. "This is a more palatable way of quenching it than my first preference, wouldn't you say?"

"I would," he slowly retorts, gauging her closely, unable to figure her out.

He questions and she manipulates, her fingers toying with a loose arrow, sifting its feathered edge between her tips. Choosing a bow, she nocks the arrow and rotates around toward the line of stationary targets rimming the western border of the maze. When she hits dead center in red, he is even more surprised, even more confounded by her peculiarity. Even more caught in the web of wicked clever Adelaide.

When she eggs him into a challenge, gets his competitive pride up, she starts to win just long enough to build his frustration before she throws her game, letting the young prince claim victory so that he may crow his falsely conciliatory arrogance and be more inclined to ingratiate the lady by cocksure courting of his standard trifling manner. And only that so she may dismiss his attention in favor of waning disinterest to keep him thinking on her, keep him bothered by the idea of her, exactly as she likes. Walks away with an enigmatic smile and a slight striking sashay.

Apparently, Nostradamus see this act of hers, because she rounds but one corner before she is snatched roughly by the arm and shoved past another, cornered crowdedly into a near alcove out of the way. Because she would recognize the sight of him anywhere, that musky forest smell mixed by a myriad of apothecary herbals, and the feel of him, that broad brutish touch that only seems to gentle for everyone but her, she knows who has accosted her before she can make out his sight, and so does not defend her person with a kick to the groin to unhand herself.

"You stay away from that boy, witch!"

"As if I have any interest in the dauphin of France." Pulling primly upright within his grasp with an abundance of dignity, she lifts her chin and quirks an insultingly superior eyebrow as she adds, "Or for that matter France itself." She jerks her arm free of his bruising grip with a pointed rip of it, as if having been offended, when that is the perfect opposite, for she is thrilled at his hot reaction, his abrupt undivided focus after weeks of never having time to be disdained of her, to be dark and suspicious of her presence with a delicious vehemence of distrust. Keeping all of that pinned tight beneath a flawless exterior of cool icy edge, of imperious dismissal, she condescendingly drawls, "My dear Damus, but the only French thing that interests me here is _you_." Then a sharper edged, "And kindly quit cursing me _witch_." With a biting smile, "Lest I put a spell on you." And head tilted, words warningly clipped, "Make you my slave perhaps."

He is fierce in his displeasure for her being here, for her antics, for her very existence at all and the natural unholy way of it. But at her taunt done low, her green eyes glinting with the truth of it, Nostradamus eases back a bit from his so hostile invasion of her intimate space, becoming wary of more than just her machinations on others, reminded suddenly of the many dangers to himself for associating with a devil creature such as the crimson-haired Scotswoman. Red like blood. Like fire. The things she could do to him are atrocity. If he were a smart man, he would have exposed her to his Court the moment she arrived. Had her burned for everyone's safety. Instead he indulged her in her wicked games. Ignored her. He kept his silence.

He doesn't know why.

Before he can figure it out, studying her face with new confusion, with grim narrow dark eyes, she pushes off where her shoulders had rested, a west wing watchtower stretching skyward above, and plants a hand center to his chest, forcing him backward hard up against the stone wall with a pointed thump as she passes. Looking back at him when she goes, Adelaide pauses as he stares to lilt threateningly, "Wouldn't _that_ be fun?" And then she is gone. Flouncing off with her ungodly witchery and her wicked schemes and scandalously shameless abandon. Her damning secrets and reckless plots and her run of the castle.

The message rings clear in her wake. Crystalline. Echoing. It leaves the seer deeply unsettled.

: : :

Matters for Mary have gotten significantly more complicated now without her crucial denial. There was reason certain things must go ignored, must be unacknowledged, unaccepted for good of all parties involved. And now she has no such protective deniability. Which justifies why she has been painstakingly avoiding her gracious host these last weeks. Every corner she turns, every room she enters, she must remind herself to be wary, to make certain he isn't waiting on the other side. The few occasions they have come face to face, she made haste to excuse herself, being not hardly subtle enough in her nerves. She is sure that she is making him uncomfortable at best, making him doubt himself, and she feels remorse for that as well, but it can't be helped. She cannot be trusted around Sebastian anymore. Not until she sorts some things out. Not until she…

"Your Grace."

"Bash!" she startles, coming short with a jolt as he appears in her path, pulling back when her head snaps up from where her gaze had strayed to the ground while she strolled the east gardens, her attention wandering concernedly.

He bows his head briefly at seeing her surprise, caught off balance, allowing her to compose. Once she has, he steps aside from her way, his hands locked loosely behind his back and his eyes uncharacteristically fixing on things in the distance rather than focusing solely on the girl as usual, probably sensing her unease and responding to settle it. "May we speak?"

"Something is on your mind, Sebastian." Distracted from her own worries by his creased brow, his demeanor of a darkening storm beneath the smoothing veneer of his calm, of his stoic stance, she is lured from her initial surge of fretted withdrawal into empathic concern. "Are you—"

"I assure you, I am well, Mary."

But she knows better. "I can see it troubles you." She tips her head as she turns, skirts gathered absently in hand as she lifts her feet and they begin toward the outlands. "Walk with me."

"I haven't seen you in some time," he mentions, moving alongside her as they go, his head low and his gaze roving their surroundings rather than to look at her, which she is relieved for, able to behave better without those eerie eyes penetrating her soul. "I hope the isolation is not beginning to affect your spirits."

"The isolation? No. Not the isolation." She means to sound effortless, but the softness carries a heavier weight to her tone, her hesitation between words carrying more meaning than she should, loud with its quietness for all that goes unsaid in its stead. "What is troubling you, Bash?"

"I have not slept well," he says in explanation against her persistence, dismissive of the remark. "That isn't what I wish to speak of."

Mary turns her head, ducking it low as she walks step by step, slow and swishing in her dress, her strides patient and lingering like her words, like her thoughts, wishing for things she cannot. Her cadence is so soft as to almost be inaudible as she admits, "I neither."

This gets him turned toward her, crystalline eyes taking her in properly for the first time today, piercing through her reticent exterior, seeing things inside he should not see. She meant she has not been sleeping well either. Also meant she has other things she wishes to speak of. Meant those two mentions are not altogether unrelated. In fact, they correlate all too closely. There are things she wishes she could speak of, wishes she could turn and say to him, to speak genuinely without a careful caging guard between what she thinks and feels and what she is actually permitted to say aloud to any but herself. Oh, if it had only to do with being brave enough to speak of her heart. Being open and honest and unafraid. If she were just a girl … but she is not. Will never be just a girl in this life. And how unfair that is, she feels acutely, not for the first time but certainly the sharpest. If she were a girl, she could talk of things like that apple shared during the Masquerade solstice. Talk of the meanings hidden in their every exchange, every glance, every stolen innocent touch ever since that fateful night.

"I'm afraid I can no longer contain myself," he tells her, and would startle her into alarm if she hadn't known it was coming, had felt unconsciously its inevitability and as such had braced herself. This is half of why she had been avoiding him. This is what she was afraid of. His grim rueful mien is enough to assure her of that. "I must—"

"No, Bash." Strongly interjecting on him, she stops and turns, looking up at him beside her as he trains his gaze off, his mouth set into a pressed line, his brow tight and furrowed below a fringe of messy brown hair, her face crinkled against the bright sun at his back as it bounces off the grand blue grey spires of the manor. "I believe I know what you must confront and I must caution you to choose another path."

"There is no choice," he disagrees, regretfully insistent against her warning, his tension almost pleading for her to understand this.

But she cannot. She can't afford to. "There is always choice."

Shaking his head slowly from side to side, he says, "I am not so strong as you think me, Mary." He takes a step toward her, closing the already narrow distance between them, reaching for her hands where they rest lightly clasped before her, pressed to her stomach. He grazes her knuckles, his fingers curving just barely over her grasp, imploring her to not look away, even as she does so. "I beg of you. Will you listen to what I have to say?"

"Bash, please," she tries again, weaker this time, less stern, all the more impactful for it still. Her expression threatens to crumple as she turns back to him, only managing to keep his direction for a second or so before she is forced to avert her attention once more, focusing on the sun which stings her sight. She wets her mouth, draws in a deep breath that moves her chest, and catches her bottom lip between her teeth harsh enough to summon blood as her head tilts, shaking in protest. "Don't do this to me."

And so his gentle demanding touch slips away. Swayed by her vulnerability, powerless against its plea, he lets go of a forceful breath and the set of his shoulders drops. He steps back.

Driven by regret, by a sudden intense pang of desperate remorse, Mary reaches for him before she can stop herself, grabs onto his arm to still him before he can go far from her. Looking up into his pained face through the yellow harshness of sunlight framing his shadow, she says, "I'm sorry." She says it softly, vehemently, her voice breaking with her aching honesty of it. This hurts so badly, and there is no rational reason that it should, no sane cause for such intense overwhelming feeling threatening to drive her to her knees. She has never felt anything so pure, so horrible, and she has no idea how to bear it alongside her dutiful resolve. "Sebastian, I'm sorry. I just—" She stops there. Doesn't know how to finish. What words are there to say? And even if she had them on hand here, would they be the words she was allowed to voice? Or would they be the array of forbidden things she must never confess? And so she echoes, "I'm sorry." Then her fingers grasping to him slip from the man and something else almost slips out. "I need…"

"What do you need?" he asks into the sudden deafening silence.

The way he looks at her in this moment. The anticipation. The hope. The dread. She can't take any more of this odd irrational torment. _Say something. Tell him._ "I—"

How can she do this? How can she not? She is being torn in half, ripped apart here beneath his avid striking stare, and she just can't breathe. So she turns and runs. Like a coward. Like a silly little girl unable to decide, unable to do what she must nor what she wants, unable to take action where action is required, or evade it where it cannot be. So she runs. Quite literally, spins swift from him and sprints away, knowing it is a ridiculous thing to do, knowing it is pointless. Because _of course_ he follows after her. Calling her name. Overtaking her stride in no time at all. Making her feel silly and inexplicable when he catches her by the arm and wrenches her around. Dizzying her with his abrupt revert to brash forcefulness. Trapping her in strong unyielding hands inside the orchard. Killing her last shreds of resistance.

"Stay with me, Mary. Talk to me. Please." He grips her tighter toward him. "Stay with me."

And she wants to. She has never wanted anything more. But she knows better. Out of breath, she says heavily, wholeheartedly, "That would damn us both."

* * *

My Songs:  
Mash Seclusion: _Fangs_ by Little Red Lung.  
Mash Turning Point: _Only You Can Save Me_ by Darin.


	15. Never Please Profess Your Love

.

**Never Please Profess Your Love**

_"When the desire so strikes, Hold your tongue, And never please profess your love, For I cannot claim the same, Despite the cry of my heart as won."_

: : :

The orchard is a stretching devotion to trees of fruition that goes on for acres, a sprawling land of color and coverage, long rows of earth kindling going far as the eye can see. When the queen darts into its depths, her skirts flying like fire in her wake with her hair, her feet racing the ground, Sebastian quickens his pace, rushing to catch up to the wildling like wind, unstoppable in her run to escape him, to escape herself, outrun every suffocating limitation of her life as sole true heir to the throne of mystic Scotland. She is a blurring flurry of black tresses and white skin beside the sea deep blue of her dress beneath a never-ending canopy of pale pink flowering from the treetops as it drifts down over her while she passes under like a magical shower of snow. The summer breeze strengthens the faster she moves, the more tumultuous her emotions raise, gaining in ferocity with a swirl of clouds overhead. Not like rain, just a force of nature sweeping in from the north, a strong blowing wind that whips at their garments, at their bodies, stinging their faces, sending the trees into an upset. Hence the sudden surreal descent of flora wisps coming down.

As soon as he reaches her, jerking the girl to a halt as he turns her around toward him, his grip insistent on her arms, all that volatile force pitches to a simmering energy, easing away from that worrying precipice of explosion. Driven fervent by her influence as if he is merely another weather himself at her mercy, he brashly demands of the girl, of the regnant queen, "Stay with me, Mary." Pulling her closer within his desperate grasp, so near to one another their heavy breaths mingle in the calming air between them now, he goes on, keeps insisting. "Talk to me. Please." And lower at her instinctive refusal, her flushed face flickering with dissent and denial, blocking him out as she tries to push free of him, head shaking, making small frustrated sounds, he is a broken open man with nothing to lose, nothing to conceal, saying softly under his breath, "Stay with me."

Heavily, wholeheartedly, finally turning her averted face back toward him, toward his gutted piercing stare, she meets those eerie eyes coldly and she says, "That would damn us both."

He is solemn in his lack of argument, of perfect unspoken understanding of what she speaks, what she means when she says something like that. The deeper meaning encompasses their every moment together, lying weighty on their peace, looming darkly in their future, imprisoning each in their own captive prisms of ill fate. There is no arguing that. There is no escaping. Voice hollow, he simply replies, "I know."

"Bash." Her own voice is embarrassingly breathless as she breaks gently from his hold on either arm of her riding gown and steps away, her back to him now. She drags in a full breath to lift her shoulders and stiffen her spine, chin rising and expression smoothing where it tries to waver again. Staying steady in cadence, she tells him, "You shouldn't have followed me."

The crystal brooding intensity of his quiet fixed focus is knee-buckling and familiar as it burns into her from behind. He always does this to her. Makes her melt. Makes her miserable, even while he makes her so … so incredibly _happy_. But she isn't happy in this moment with him here. She isn't anything but achingly resigned. And it only makes her grieve more as she hears his echoing defeat. "I told you … I had no choice."

_I know_, she thinks, almost despairingly. She thinks, _I know what you need to say. I know what it is eating away at you, Bash. I feel it too. This need. This agony. This power … I'm lost without you._ But theirs is a wrecking ball love. A force of destruction. Of doom. Terrible. Wonderful. A love that can never be. If she should give into her feelings, her weakness, she would cost Sebastian his life. She would cost her kingdom everything.

Yet even still with this in mind, she thinks, _Don't let me go. Please, Bash. Don't ever let me go._ Because he is right. There is no choice. There was never a choice in this trap. But there has to be. There _must_ be…

"My queen," he murmurs gently, and she feels him turn to face her, feels him take a step closer toward her there. Her body tenses, on the verge of running again, but she is frozen this time now, unable to run anymore, unable to move to protect herself, to protect him, to protect their nations. A little less lightly than before, a lot more intently, more pointedly, like the fine edge of a sword, his voice barely a whisper but strong and deep, he asks of her, "What do you need?"

The pale pink blossoms blanketing her rich black hair as it falls wild around her splash color to soften the stark contrasts of the Scottish girl. Tufts like snowflakes fall along her flesh in ghostly wisping waves, forsaking the treetops, bathing her in their evanescent petals. They touch upon her cheek where his hands wish to go, wish to stroke across the sharp graceful bone and the soft shape by the edge of his palm, by the backs of his curled fingers, but he doesn't dare, however beautiful the sight of her there becomes when she revolves around to look on him once more. And because she has that look about her again, that queenly slant, he braces for impact.

"I want Francis." And she does. She wants him for the sweet childhood memories they share. She wants him because he made butterflies flutter in her stomach like a schoolgirl. She wants him to save herself from any other fate. Wants him in the way that her country so needs his alliance. And she is Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, so what her country needs, she needs. But to say as such sounds hollow, even in her thoughts, never mind how her voice might shape it, so she says another. She says _wants_. She says she wants his brother, because it is the truth. This is the only truth she can afford to speak of.

"That isn't what I asked."

"I've always wanted Francis. You know that—"

Pushed into uncharacteristically outward fervor by her coldly quivering obstinacy, Bash bursts loose of his control. He snaps huskily, "What do you _need_, Mary? Tell me." Hands catching her at her sides, he shoves her swiftly backward until she collides with the trunk of a cherry blossom tree. Roughly. It jars her with shock. Her eyes go wide and her lips part as the air in her lungs leaves her. His sudden unrestraint dizzies the girl. "Tell me," he pleads, begs beneath the sound of their harsh breathing in sync, of the wind as it rustles around them, of the trees as they sway through its push, his deep voice driven raw and needy in its desperate demand, its imploring, "Just tell me, Mary." And her heart breaks. Her pulse hitches. He is pressing into her with his hands, with his blue eyes, with his words and his soul, calling for her to ease his pain, to bring him peace, when he knows just as well as she does that she mustn't ever be permitted such allowance. "Mary…"

Though she cannot breathe, and she cannot think with him so close, his presence so insistent, his proximity so distracting to the senses, she manages to swallow, to wet her lips and suck in air, manages to shakily tell him, "I can't give you what you want. Sebastian, I can't."

He comes to his senses almost instantly, gaze going side to side across her face, glancing down at his hands taking liberties to touch her, to grasp her, and he hurriedly pulls back in shock himself. Horrified by his outburst. "I'm sorry." He clears his throat and steps unsteadily back from the girl he had just pinned to a tree, seeming dazed as he says faintly, "I have no idea why I've done this." The slight stumbling of his attempt to put distance between them is staggering.

_She_ did this to him, she accursedly realizes, and the underlying accusation makes her sicken. She provoked him into this madness. This urgency of need. She should never have led him on so in such a cruel way, revealing her feelings for him with every look, every touch, every implying word. If she had done as she should have, if she had been more thoughtful of him, of the grief she could cause to others by her indecisive selfishness, she would never have pushed him into such a display so uncharacteristic of the honorable man with his laidback content. He deserves so much better. He deserves to have never met her at all.

Before he goes, she reaches out and her fingers find his wrist at his side without any thought. Another reflex in need of curbing. He stills, angles to look back at her, his expression clouded and yet so very intent. Their eyes are locked and their breathes hitched and she cannot break free from this trance, this damning pull, and so she gives a telling tug. And condemns them both to tragedy. Catching her face fast in his hands when he comes surging toward her from the trigger of her pull, he crashes firmly into her body, forces it into the cherry tree again, bringing them flush together, his mouth capturing hers beneath him in a sudden striving kiss.

Swept under his spell, swept _away_ by the surprising rush of his assault, of his fervid desire and stormy passion, she would have gripped onto him, would have opened herself under his advance. But he yanks himself off her immediately, again reacting just a second too slow to prevent himself, pulling to the side, casting his splintered focus off at the ground as he wipes his mouth, as if he can remove the stain of shame at his brash scoundrel actions. His reckless weakness. He rips off of her and leaves the young queen frozen with kissed parted lips and wide blind eyes, leaves her stupid, caught in the moment before. Stunned, she touches trembling fingertips delicately to her mouth, absorbing it all, finding herself turned inside out. Turned inside out in a very real, acutely physical way that she hadn't grasped even seconds earlier.

"I am … so sorry," he exclaims, breathy and low, his back rigid where it greets her paces away. "Mary, I cannot excuse myself." Tone barely audible, gravelly deep, "I must be possessed."

_Yes_, she thinks distractedly. They both must be.

But when he turns to face her from a proper distance, bowing his head, she is possessed herself in such a way that she cannot control herself in this, cannot keep herself from what she does next. Possessed into reaching out and catching fingers in his leather doublet and tugging him in a step. Possessed into propelling forward then from the tree, flinging her arms around his shoulders once their chests collide, locking about his neck when she throws herself headlong and hard at the man. She throws herself into him, into his kiss, in a deep hungry transgression of the very French variety. Warm hands fall to the dip of her lower back and press, holding her to him, which makes her spine arch like a bow against his body, standing on her toes, shivering deliciously when one of those big warm hands slides across her contours, splaying at the center of the small of it all, pushing her into him from behind, clutching her tightly within his embrace in a way that steals a soft throaty sound from deep down low inside her that reminisces suspiciously of animal keening.

They kiss and kiss and kiss, swapping breaths, stroking tongues, lips tangling softly, sweetly, richly, her fingers clenching in the dark strands at the back of his head, keeping him with her as she sinks into oblivion. Into madness. It is rough and rushed and furious, and then it is gentle and deep and languid, at last getting to know one another in this way, from very start to finish. As they finally part, his hands settled on her hips pulling her gently down from her toes until there is space between their faces, eyes still hooded heavily, lost in the lingering sensation, she allows a sad sigh, near to mournful in its wistfulness, her pale fingers pinching tightly in leather where they cling to the lapels of his vest. His heart beats against her chest and she feels it thrum, vibrating all through her whole body the same as his touch does, making her shiver, making her crazy.

Coming slowly to her senses, to rude reality, she shuts her eyes and rests her brow to his nose, swollen lips whispering over his skin as she faintly says, "That must never happen twice."

His palms rise to bracket her head once more, pressing his lips lightly to her crown, lingeringly, before he assents with a darkly grave, "I know."

Then, once they part properly, collecting themselves in heavy reluctance, with defeated duty, Mary begins to walk away, just to be caught firmly at the arm by his bold hand, spinning her back into him, colliding swiftly in one last fervently fiery kiss, impassioned for a bright brilliant moment, his hands on her face, her head up in the clouds.

Until they once more break apart. To never dare touch again.

* * *

My Songs:  
Mash Eruption: _Burn_ by Ellie Goulding.


	16. So Far From What We Want

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**So Far From What We Want**

_"If we should not fall to sleep, And sleep as one, We shall spend our nights forever apart in the quiet dark, So very far from all that we want."_

: : :

The weather turns within a week. The white clouds over blue summer sky darken, rumbling dangerously like a great beast driven to ire. The sign portends bad things, warns of dark times to come, and Mary knows enough now of her time with Kinsley, of her hidden experiences in life newly remembered, enough to take it as the glimpse it seems to be. She isn't so foolish as to believe superstitious upsets like reacting vitally to a change in the weather, as if listening to the discontent of God, because her mind is more sensible than that, but it does leave a tightening pit in her stomach, make her fret and brood over the future.

Not that she wouldn't be doing that anyway. For a moment, just one brief brilliantly joyous moment in lost time, she began to forget that darkness always advancing on the horizon, always just over the ridge, and she was happy. But it was a daydream sort of state. And as is inevitable with those sorts, reality came crashing back in on her all too soon. So here she is. Watching the storm approach.

_If I could ever beg a single favor from your mighty grace, _she wonders in morning benediction, _I would ask that you illuminate the way to my heart._ Bringing the backs of her fingers to ghost over her lips as she sits at her window seat and gazes forlornly through the prism glass, she gives a sigh and thinks, _And then kindly unilluminate its secrets so that I may live in peace with my decisions._ For she is tortured nightly and daily by things she has no control over. No choice of.

She dreamt of something lovely last evening. A respite in the night, it only serves to sharpen the ache inside herself when she wakes.

In this dream, she was back in the orchard, pale pink cherry blossoms swirling through the air, a cool wind dancing about the land, rustling the trees, invigorating her exposed skin as she lay in the grass beneath a cherry tree. Her garments had come undone to drape loosely about her body, so there be nothing to constrict her in this moment, no physical reminders of the shrinking cage of restraints that bind her in life. With a shimmering sun and a biting breeze to contrast the warming body lain alongside her own, she shuts her eyes and revels the afternoon, utterly irrevocably free, if only for this immediate present. They spend the day lazing in the orchard under the summer sun in a gentle snowfall of flowers, eating wild cherry fruit plucked from the branch, listening to their hearts beat inside their chests, listening to the wind and the birds in the sky and the river flowing in the distance. His blue eyes are beautiful and his dark hair is messily unkempt in that so familiarly endearing charm she is ever caught up by. His fingers toil absently there in her wavy raven tresses, sifting through the thick mane, worsening the tangles of her uncombed curls as they splay about contented the pair, its lush length growing ever longer every day. There are no cares on her mind. There are no worries in her heart. And for the time, for just a marvelous second, everything is just absolutely perfect.

Then she wakes. She wakes and the world comes rushing back.

It would be easier if she were still in Amboise, still spending her days beside her betrothed as his simpering deceitful court swarmed about them, reminding her constantly of her chosen path, of her inescapable condition. But she is not in Amboise. No. Mary has been secreted away instead into hiding from threats about the royal residence, from an English queen and a French one too, all the more dangerous for how much closer she is to the heart of her aim, with the one person in the world who threatens to endanger that condition, secreted away to Château de Chenonceaux, where his mother resides, kept under the watchful protection of sweet torturous Sebastian and a few select royal guard that may be trusted to be loyal to their king and his interests, to _solely_ their king without exception. She finds it almost amusing that the all powerful king of France must hide away his future daughter-in-law with his illegitimate son and previous mistress in order to shield her from his own wife. Under the pretense of English threats, of course, but they all know the truth of things. Then, when the amusement fades, she curses Catherine. Not for her vindictive quest on Mary's life and honor, but for the unforeseen consequences of such a vendetta. If she could have been safe within d'Amboise as she should be, she would never have been taken away to this place. This beautiful lonely place. This heartbreaking house. If she had never found sanctuary here from her problems, from her unhappiness, she would not be so conflicted as she is presently. In the end, she thinks this refuge from the conniving queen of France just may threaten to achieve her those traitorous ambitions after all. And then she thinks that she must never think that. Must never even contemplate the possibility of such a disastrous turn of fate. She needs to return to Amboise soon. Very soon. Threats on her life, she can handle, but this internal struggle of decision is turning tide. She must not waver. She must not give into weakness. Into flights of fancy. She has to believe that everything will be good again once she returns to Amboise. Returns to Francis.

But how? How will it ever be good again? How will she ever go back?

She won't forget her time here. No matter what she needs to convince herself of, she knows in her heart that she will never find the simplicity she once knew. That easy infatuation with the boy she needs to bind herself to forever. The peace of such a childish surety. She may return to Francis, but she will never return to who she was before. That girl. That child.

When she is weakened by her will, by her need and her love for a man she knows she mustn't be bound to, she opens the small chest locked in her care, as she has done a million times before. The chest that is her most personal belonging. The chest that keeps her going. Steels her resolve whenever she falters, buckling under the weight of pressure, of her duty. Today, she takes a seat on a chaise before the hearth, leaving the window and its ominous overlook behind to sit close by the fire, and lifts the small carved wooden thing carefully into her lap, smoothing delicate fingers over the etching of her royal crest upon its centre surface. She breathes in deep and raises it open, working to school herself, her oscillating convictions. Inside the chest is a cluttered leaf of letters from her mother, written over her life in the convent and in France, letters which spend more time discussing a shifting political climate of Scotland, its corresponding alliances and enemies as well, than on any motherly sentiment for her estranged daughter. Mary understands. There isn't time to indulge in selfish things like sentiment for beleaguered queens and their ruling regents. Mother is doing her duty in Scotland, preserving their reign, protecting their people, fighting to resuscitate a dying kingdom. Mary is doing hers by being here, by surviving long enough to secure an ally of France to which the magnitude of would revive her suffering nation, by not destroying that chance on a whim of dangerously unwise emotion.

And so Mary of Guise spends her writings instructing her distanced daughter on what it is to be the Queen of Scots, on all the things she will need to be knowledgeable on of current events, so that when the time comes for the regnant queen to step in and take control of her kingdom, she will never be fatally uninformed in her political ignorance. Mother has spent her life keeping her apprised of situations, of the state of her nation, of the consequences of what will befall them all should she fail in her ultimate duty. If she should sabotage this alliance with France, aside from the aftermath of creating the fury of an enemy of them, her country would be without support in their defense against the English, and all else who would overtake them, including the Protestant unrest that is building beneath the surface of Scottish society with every day that passes them by. They would be beleaguered longer still by poverty and internal strife, on the brink of civil war as nobles grow restless, as the Protestant and Catholic factions grow more animosity between them. England would set upon their shores, and their borders, battering them from all sides, overrunning her with their far superior forces, their richer resources, and Scotland would fall. The name Mary, Queen of Scots, would live on in infamy as the silly selfish girl who led her land to ruin for the sake of her silly selfish heart and its dangerous desire.

Nothing is more important than that.

Certainly not a silly selfish sixteen-year-old girl who happens to be Queen.

The very idea that it might seems ludicrous. She would scoff at such an insane suggestion still. But then she remembers Bash. She thinks of him and suddenly things that seemed so clear only a moment ago become clouded. Become impossibly difficult to decide. She cannot marry the man. She could _never_ marry him. She cannot jilt his brother. She must _never_ risk her union with Francis. Not for anything in the world. Her kingdom needs this. Scotland _needs_ France.

But she needs something else. She needs a bastard prince, not a future king, regardless of her nation's needs. So she could never marry him. She could not choose Bash over Francis, not strictly, but must that mean she has to be without him entirely? Couldn't she have something for herself? Just for a little awhile? For a moment in time. If no one ever knew…

This beautiful lonely place is an island. A sanctuary away from the world. Why could she not choose to be happy just this once, as long as she is here? If it doesn't affect her future in France. Why couldn't she?

Galvanized by this thought of mind, Mary takes the stack of aged letters, fastened by twine, takes them from the chest and sets it aside so she may stand, letters tightly in hand, and walk with them to the hearth. Thunder booms outside in the distance. A flash of striking lightning cracks out her window, brightening the dark grey daylight for a brief heartbeat. Encouraging her nerves to stir and be alive. To act rash. With a quick impulsive breath, she throws the stack into the fireplace and steps back in shock. In liberation. Watching numbly as flames eat away at her mother's letters, at her ultimate symbol of confinement. A hand smoothes across her stomach, holding her together through the surge of doubt, of uneasy anxiousness. And then the bright shock of relief. Freedom. Reckless uninhibited freedom. For a bright brilliant second, she can be anyone, do anything at all. She spins fast in her giddiness, her bursting brilliance, starts to move fast toward the open archway of her chamber door. To rush out. To find him. To revel in this release.

Except that all she gets is three steps. And then she falters. Reality again. Coming rushing back. How silly she is. How unforgivably stupid. Torturing herself this way. Deceiving herself in this way. And to think of what she almost did. She almost did something she couldn't take back. She almost ruined everything. Overcome by guilt and regret and shame, she turns around toward the flames, mourning the loss of history, the only pieces of her mother she has been afforded since childhood, scolding herself for such irrational antics. Will she never be free of this conflict? Of this indecision and debilitating weakness of will? Will the intensity of this feeling never fade?

Gripping the edges of the sculpted hearth, Mary hangs her head, presses harshly into its stone, biting into her palms, her fingertips digging in. She shuts her eyes and concentrates on breathing. Her body is so heavy. Everything is so heavy. This pressure. This horrible weight always threatening to crush her beneath its demands. She can't take it anymore. She can't take it.

"I'm sorry," she whispers, a ragged confession to the silence of the room, to him and to herself, to everyone she has failed and is failing and will fail. She is just so sorry.

"You have nothing to apologize for, my child." That voice. The low dulcet tone startles the girl, sending her spinning around to face the doorway with a gasp, to find the poised lady of the house standing there in its shadowed space, her hands clasped before her exquisite Parisian gown while she takes liberties to spy, watching the young queen with an enigmatic quality about her that feels constant from the woman. Once she has Mary's attention, she amends, "Yet."

"Lady Diane. You've surprised me." There is a softness to her cadence that is characteristic but a slight edge lacing the words that speak of highborn warning. Lightly, loadedly, she admonishes, "You must announce yourself or else you might give me a scare."

A dark brow hitches up. "We wouldn't want that then."

"Certainly not."

Diane de Poitiers, Duchess of Valentinois, and her current hostess. A graceful one to be sure, although she does avoid the queen as much as is polite, and Mary senses a great unease about her in her presence, as if she disapproves of more than a few things regarding the girl. Most to do with her only son, Mary supposes. And she doesn't blame her for it. But it is more than that in essence. There is an unsettling mysteriousness about the noblewoman. A removal which makes her wary. She moves slowly around the chaise, unobstructing the quiet distance between the two women, and tries to tactfully prompt an address.

The lady only looks at her. That inscrutable expression again. Those keen knowing eyes which penetrate past her fabricated façade. Like she knows all her secrets and she is too superior in class to actually disapprove. Too high above to concern herself with the imprudent triflings of children, even if she sees all, her disinterest keeping her from involving herself. That gaze unnerves the girl. Makes her question her footing. And she is already doing plenty of that on her own.

Finally, she can't sustain her patience, her stubbornness to outlast the lady, to intimidate her into explaining herself without vocal insistence, and so she gives up. Levels her with an even look. A penetrating stare of her own. "You have come to say what is on your mind, Lady Diane. I doubt you will be going until you do. Please. Speak freely."

"He is waiting for you," Diane returns without hesitation, her gentle hushed voice somehow a slap of stern seriousness, leaving Mary momentarily taken aback. There is no need to name this _he_. They both know who it is she speaks of, who is in their thoughts. No point in pretending otherwise. Not with each other. "He will wait all his life."

Hollow, she murmurs dazedly, "Would he?"

Lady Diane is unsympathetic. Merciless. As glass. "If you love my son, you mustn't let him."

Gutted, sharply wary, intensely reluctant as well, Mary takes another step blindly backward in her distraction and presses a hand firm to her stomach once more, feeling as if she may be loosed to a hundred separate pieces any second now. Cut adrift into the air. After a moment of floating at a loss, she comes to her senses, steels herself. She turns toward the window. Faces its prism facets, reflecting back at her, standing there before the storm.

Swallowing her resistance, Mary clarifies, "What is it you are asking me to do?"

"You know what you must do. You must make him believe."

"Believe what?"

Resolutely, unforgivingly, the lady declares, "What he needs to believe to survive."

: : :

_The rain is a steady stuttering staccato of misery, hammering down upon the soaked lowlands. Slicking the hillsides with mud. Flooding the valleys. Drowning out the harsh keening cries of pain and terror that echo through the air as the storm rages on uncaring to the suffering surrounding it. Women and children. Men shouting in battle. Innocents being slaughtered in the crossing path to marching onward across their lands in the dead of night. In the wild storm. Blood sluices into mud, running with the rain, bloody swords clattering to the ground from fallen fighters, fires starting up to lick at the thatched roofs of the nearby village as it is ravaged, almost but not quite all doused by the ferocious rain. Not fast enough to save their homes. As they lay dying._

Memory comes in jagged remembrance, a déjà vu incoherence molded into a messy dream, fragments of fact and fiction bleeding together like the mud and the rain and the blood of men and women and children slain in the night by cowards. It torments her in her fitful sleep without relief … until Adelaide is awakened during the night by a quiet unbidden entrance to her quarters. Pulling her from the clenching quivering grips of _bête noire_ as her sixth sense pricks into predator alertness. Warning her of trespass.

By candlelight lit from magick, wicks sparking to life around the small guest bedchamber soon as her eyes snap open, she pushes slowly upright in her cramped borrowed bed against a cold wall and makes out the silhouette of her favorite seer, looming like a large shadow in the low doorway. He is all doom and gloom as always, a perpetual dark cloud of a human being, but his appearance piques her interest. Curiosity makes her quiet. Makes her stay poised still where she is, sitting up in bed only partially, propped by her hands against the lumpy mattress. The covers pooling in her lap expose the thin transparent muslin of her nightdress, fallen off one shoulder, baring a collarbone. Her red hair hangs in tangled ropes around her. Her green eyes gleam in the darkness.

She waits for him to explain. Not bothered into helping him along.

And he does. "I had a vision of the past recently," he reveals, gravelly voice rougher than usual, thickened by sleep and other less definable things, "Of you."

Adelaide smirks. Sinks back a bit in the bed. Down to her elbows. "Yes, I guessed that you were busy dreaming of me."

He doesn't take the bait. All he says is, "I saw the slaughter, Lady Kinsley."

Her playful countenance darkens to something solemn. Something grave. "I see."

So that was why she had been dreaming of things long left in the past this eve. Because _he_ had. Things best kept to history. She wishes he wouldn't stir such things up again. Doesn't want to have to dream of them. She has dreamed of them so many times in her life, she thought she let that go. But these are the risks of chasing a prophet. With a resigned sigh, she curls her legs toward herself and he takes the unspoken invitation to sit tentatively down at the end of her bed. He looks after the candles in the room. The altar nearby cluttered with her tools of the trade. Items that would get her onto a pyre if they should be discovered. She doesn't even try to conceal them. Flaunts it. As if she is looking for death. Waiting for the flame.

Adelaide isn't a death wisher, whatever he may suspect.

She is a woman with too much to live for. Having too much fun.

The past is the past. It holds no bearings on her present. That being said, she would rather not suffer nightmares of those dark periods, and she knows that if he isn't made to understand it then he will continue dreaming of her history, subconsciously straining to comprehend the creature he despises and yet cannot rid himself of.

What he saw was the massacre of her first clan. Of her every last living relative. All her family. They were collateral damage wreaked by a company of English soldiers marching north from their borders toward Edinburgh some many years ago. The sole survivor of a slaughter, as he named it. The only reason Adelaide survived, as an ignorant innocent young child, was because her mother hid her with a cloaking spell in the lowest valley before the soldiers set upon them in the night. She had glimpsed a premonition and knew there was not time enough to do much else but spare her youngest child. She had huddled there in the mud of a hillside canopy for three days amidst the remains of her slain clan. Finally the spell died, last dregs of her mother's magick fading away from this earth, and she wandered the drenched dreary lowlands in the wake of the storm until incidentally coming across a neighboring clan that took her in for those brief years she could not survive on her own. She tells him this. Simply. Shortly. Shares her original story.

"I am sorry, Adelaide … for your tragedy." His words are stilted and force, but there lie a shred of genuine compassion for the girl she had once been, a girl he suspects died in that canopy with her mother's magick. Quieter still, he admits, "I regret you suffered so unkindly."

The reluctance of him and yet the fact that he is here regardless makes her grin. "It was a very long time ago. None of that matters now." She brushes off his fleeting compassion only because it bores her, smiling instead with determined irreverence as she goes on to tease, "Mister Michel, ah, why, I'd never known you were such a soft touch." Uncurling one leg to stretch it down and nudge his thigh with her toes, she sits further upright again, scrunched at the middle, leaning toward him. "I would have surely shared my youthful woes with you long before now if I'd suspected you would be so susceptible to these pitiful manipulations."

Tired of her, Nostradamus rolls his eyes and stands to leave with a gruff rumble, nearly a growl. "Good evening, my lady."

Mockingly, delightedly, Adelaide chimes loudly after his retreat, "Sweet dreams, dear Damus."

* * *

My Songs:  
Mash Comedown/Ademus Moment: _If I Had a Heart_ by Fever Ray.


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